ial restrictions, only to
be made unwelcome in their new homes in the settled areas of
Pennsylvania. Displaced persons in a new country, they were forced by
lives of conflict to seek better opportunity by moving to undeveloped
lands. As a result, they settled along the West Branch of the
Susquehanna, beyond the authority of the crown and outside the pressures
of the Provincial legislature.

If man is a predatory beast in his natural state, a belief some
expressed in the eighteenth century, then it follows naturally that
every society must have some agency of authority and control. The
universally standardized solution to the problem of social control is
government. The Fair Play system was the answer on this Susquehanna
frontier to the need for some legitimate agency of force.[4] This system
vested authority in the people through annual elections of a tribunal of
three of their number. The members of the tribunal were given
quasi-executive, legislative, and judicial powers over all the settlers
in the West Branch Valley "beyond the purchase line."[5]

Although no record of any of these elections has been preserved, the
composition of the Fair Play tribunal in 1776 has been established and
verified by subsequent reviews of land claims in the county courts.[6]
Also, two of the members of the tribunal of 1775 are identified in a
pre-emption claim made before the Lycoming County Court in 1797.[7] It
is interesting to note that among these five men are represented the
three most prominent national stock groups in the area, with the
Scotch-Irish, as our earlier sample demonstrated, in the majority.

Lacking returns of the annual elections of the tribunal and minutes of
its actual meetings, we have only Smith's _Laws of the Commonwealth of
Pennsylvania_, petitions from the Fair Play settlers, and the subsequent
review of land questions by the Northumberland and Lycoming County
courts to evaluate the tribunal, its members, and its procedures.
However, these data are more than adequate in giving us a picture of
this _de facto_, though illegal, rule, which existed in the West Branch
Valley until the Treaty of Fort Stanwix in 1784 brought the territory
under Commonwealth jurisdiction. The composition of the electorate
varied with the fluctuations in population caused by the two Stanwix
treaties, the Revolution, and the Great Runaway.

Since property and religious qualifications were the primary
prerequisites to voting at this