Wild Yankees

Northeast Pennsylvania's Wyoming Valley was truly a dark and bloody ground, the site of murders, massacres, and pitched battles. The valley's turbulent history was the product of a bitter contest over property and power known as the Wyoming controversy. This dispute, which raged between the mid-eighteenth and early-nineteenth centuries, intersected with conflicts between whites and native peoples over land, a jurisdictional contest between Pennsylvania and Connecticut, violent contention over property among settlers and land speculators, and the social tumult of the American Revolution. In its later stages, the controversy pitted Pennsylvania and its settlers and speculators against "Wild Yankees"—frontier insurgents from New England who contested the state's authority and soil rights.In Wild Yankees, Paul B. Moyer argues that a struggle for personal independence waged by thousands of ordinary settlers lay at the root of conflict in northeast Pennsylvania and across the revolutionary-era frontier. The concept and pursuit of independence was not limited to actual war or high politics; it also resonated with ordinary people, such as the Wild Yankees, who pursued their own struggles for autonomy. This battle for independence drew settlers into contention with native peoples, wealthy speculators, governments, and each other over land, the shape of America's postindependence social order, and the meaning of the Revolution. With vivid descriptions of the various levels of this conflict, Moyer shows that the Wyoming controversy illuminates settlement, the daily lives of settlers, and agrarian unrest along the early American frontier.

Wild Yankees is a highly readable account of the turmoil in Pennsylvania's Wyoming Valley from the 1750s to the early 1800s. Paul B. Moyer characterizes the events as a farmers' revolution, and his key argument is that the contest over control of northeastern Pennsylvania (commonly referred to as the Yankee-Pennamite Wars) was part of a larger pattern of agrarian unrest that paralleled the Regulator Movement in North Carolina in the 1770s, Shays' Rebellion in western Massachusetts in the mid-1780s, and the Whiskey Rebellion in southwestern Pennsylvania in the 1790s.... It is a vivid account of the turmoil along Pennsylvania's northeastern frontier from the mid-eighteenth century into the early nineteenth century.... Wild Yankees certainly is an important contribution to the literature of the American Revolution in Pennsylvania, and it is a volume that anyone interested in frontier settlement, ethnic conflict, and Pennsylvania history should read., In Wild Yankees, Paul B. Moyer provides more than a fresh take on the sad history of the rural insurgency in Pennsylvania's Susquehanna Valley. At the same time that Moyer unpacks the story of how Anglo-Americans competed violently with Native Americans and with each other, making his book a useful study for historians of Pennyslvania, he uses the fight for land to provide an alternative framework for understanding the American Revolution., Moyer can hold his head high, having written for the northeastern Pennyslvania frontier a history comparable to Alan Taylor's Liberty Men and the Great Proprietors and Reeve Huston's Land and Freedom for upstate New York., The concept and pursuit of independence was not limited to actual war of high politics; it also resonated with ordinary people, such as the Wild Yankees, who pursued their own struggle for autonomy. With vivid descriptions of the various levels of the conflict, the author shows that the Wyoming controversy illuminates the process of settlement, the daily lives of settlers, and agrarian unrest along the early American frontier.

Paul B. Moyer is Associate Professor of History at The College at Brockport (SUNY). He is the author of The Public Universal Friend: Jemima Wilkinson and Religious Enthusiasm in Revolutionary America, also from Cornell.