ABSTRACT
Backcountry areas in the Ohio Country, west of Pennsylvania, and in the Shenandoah Valley, west of Virginia, were at the leading edge of dreams of empire. Imperial officials thought of these regions as buffer zones to protect established holdings; their settlement meant that claims would reach increasingly deeper into the interior. Migrants meanwhile dreamed of gaining an economic “competency,” and sometimes their aspirations clashed with those of the officials who had originally encouraged their presence. Given this context, it was easy for back country zones to become sites of rivalry between empires, between immigrant peoples and native peoples, between backcountry folk and “eastern elites,” and between various sets of alliances involving all of these groups.
