The problem of communication between the frontier and the settled areas was a difficult one compounded by the natural geographic barriers and the fact that post and coach roads did not extend into this central Pennsylvania region. As a result the inhabitants had to depend upon occasional travelers, circuit riders, surveyors, and other Provincial authorities who visited them infrequently. Otherwise, the meetings of the Fair Play tribunal, irregular as they were, and the communications from the county Committee of Safety were about the only sources of information available. Of course, cabin-building, cornhusking, and quilting parties provided ample opportunities for the dissemination of strictly "local" news. Newspapers were not introduced into the upper Susquehanna Valley until around the turn of the century. The _Northumberland Gazette_ was published in Sunbury in 1797 or 1798.[10] The first truly West Branch paper was not circulated until 1802, when the _Lycoming Gazette_ was first published in Williamsport.[11] On the eve of the Revolution there were only seven newspapers available in the entire Province, none of which circulated as far north as the Fair Play territory.[12] As a matter of fact, there were only thirty-seven papers printed in all thirteen colonies at the beginning of the Revolution.[13] The Fair Play settler was an "outlaw," a squatter who came into this central Pennsylvania wilderness with his family and without the benefit of a land grant, and who literally hacked and carved out a living. The natural elements, the savage natives, and the wild life all resisted him; but he conquered them all, and the conquest gave him a feeling of accomplishment which enhanced his independent spirit. If the story of the Great Plains frontier can be told in terms of railroads, barbed-wire fences, windmills, and six-shooters,[14] then the cruder tale of the West Branch frontier can be told in terms of the rifle, the axe, and the plow. The rifle, first and foremost as the weapon of security, was the basic means of self-preservation in a wild land where survival was a constant question.[15] The axe, which Theodore Roosevelt later described as "a servant hardly standing second even to the rifle,"[16] was the main implement of destruction and construction. It was used for clearing the forest of the many trees which encroached upon the acreage which the settler had staked out for himself, and for cutting the logs which would provide the rude, one-room shelter the pioneer constructed for himself and his family. The crude wooden plow was the implement which made this frontiersman a farmer, although its effectiveness was extremely limited. However, the soil was so fertile, and the weeds so sparse, that scratching the earth and scattering seeds produced a crop.[17]