Wild Yankees: The Struggle for Independence Along Pennsylvania's Revolutionary 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 casts the struggles between Connecticut claimants and Pennsylvania settlers at the center of a new view of the American Revolutionary period. Moyer's emphasis on the farmers' revolution and the struggles over property and power on the Pennsylvania frontier significantly adds to the growing scholarship focusing on the lives of ordinary folk. Wild Yankees clearly illustrates how the everyday experiences of those living on the frontier shaped the American Revolution.

Paul B. Moyer's evocation of the day-to-day interests of Pennamites and Connecticut claimants is vivid; Wild Yankees shows that the American Revolution and its immediate aftermath were part of a larger internal struggle over the future of America. Moyer helps to demolish the notion of a single group of 'settlers' by showing the vehement animosity among Anglo-Americans in the region as they struggled with each other over subsistence and land rights.