In the first chapter of his recent study, _The Making of an American Community_, Merle Curti suggests that "less is to be gained by further analysis of Turner's brilliant and far-ranging but often ambiguous presentations than by patient and careful study of particular frontier areas in the light of the investigator's interpretation of Turner's theory."[1] This study was undertaken with just such a purpose in mind. In addition, it is hoped that this investigation will give some insight into the value of ethnography and its usefulness as an analytic technique in studying the frontier. By definition, ethnography is "the scientific description of nations or races of men, their customs, habits, and differences."[2] Frontier ethnography is the scientific description of the full institutional pattern of a particular group of people, located specifically on a certain frontier, within a certain period of time. That institutional pattern is described from the analysis of data concerning the political and economic systems, and the social structure, including religion, the family, the value system, social classes, art, music, recreation, mythology, and folklore. Also, as noted in the first two chapters of this study, geographic and demographic data have been analyzed in an attempt to picture the area under observation and the people who inhabited that region. It is believed that these various data present a fuller view of the "way of life" of these people than the earlier politico-military accounts of nineteenth-century historians. Of course, there are certain limitations in this particular analysis. This study is not meant to be typical of the frontier experience or necessarily representative of frontier communities. However, it would have broader implications if a similar study were made for Greene County in western Pennsylvania, where a group composed mainly of Scotch-Irish Presbyterians also set up a "Fair Play system."[3] Furthermore, it is my interpretation of Turner's thesis which is being tested, not the validity of the thesis. Despite the fact that the Fair Play settlers and their "system" have been referred to by both Pennsylvania and frontier historians in the twentieth century, neither the settlers nor their system has been studied in depth.[4] Meginness and Linn, the foremost historians of the West Branch, were both nineteenth-century writers, and, unfortunately, twentieth-century scholars have not considered the Fair Play settlers worthy of their study. Biographical studies are limited to the work of Edwin MacMinn on Colonel Antes, completed in 1900. As a result, there has been a definite need for an investigation collating the researches of these earlier historians and based upon the available primary data. This study is an attempt to fill the void.