proclamation condemned Stump for illegally squatting on Native American land near Fort Augusta.
It is not known for certain when Frederick Stump first settled in the area that is now Snyder County. However, he seems to have first established himself as a troublemaker in the region in the autumn of 1766. During this time, Pennsylvania Governor John Penn condemned Stump for squatting on Native American land “near to Fort-Augusta.” Stump apparently claimed to have received Penn’s permission to settle there. However, Penn vigorously denied this and asserted “that the said Report is utterly false and groundless” and that “no Person…ever had the least Encouragement from [him] to settle on any Lands unpurchased of the Indians.”
Note that in his proclamation, Penn explicitly prohibited both the occupation of land beyond the boundary of the Colony and “taking any Posession of Lands, by marking Trees.” Native Americans complained regularly of Euro-Americans surveying beyond the western border of Pennsylvania, marking trees as they planned future homesteads and mill sites. Though Stump later moved away from the Fort Augusta area, his shaky relations with Native Americans and bad reputation with the Pennsylvania government would not end there. This first round of the “Stump Affair” ended with colonial officials burning Stump out; this had been a common practice since at least the 1740s. Burning the cabins of squatters was Pennsylvania’s tangible sign to Native Americans that the Colony did not support white settlers’ encroachments.
In 1766, when he made these claims against Stump, the Governor was dealing with the aftermath of the Black Boys rebellion the previous year. Penn had heard from Henry Seymour Conway, the English Secretary of State for the Southern Department, who expressed King George III’s “greatest Concern” about the seeming lack of respect that colonists had for the Colonial or Royal systems of law. Although Conway was referring explicitly to Stamp Act protests, Penn surely viewed urban disturbances against tax laws as similar problems as his frontier issues. Conway’s observations about colonists’ attempt to “obstruct & impede” English procedures echoed officials’ reactions to the Black Boys’ raids on westbound wagon trains. Conway’s advice to Penn was to show no hesitation against flagrant violations of the law:
…you will in the strongest Colours represent to them the dreadful Consequences that must inevitably attend the forcible and violent resistance to Acts of the British Parliament, and the scene of Misery and Calamity to themselves, and of Mutual Weakness & Distraction to both Counties inseparable from such a conduct.
During the year between this episode and the massacre that would bear Stump’s name, nothing seemed to calm down. The Irish-born trader George Croghan heard from French trader Alexander Maisonville that the Senecas used a wampum belt in the summer of 1767 to deliver the following message to the Delawares and Shawanese in the Ohio Country: “Brethren those Lands are Yours, as well as ours, God gave them to us Live upon & before the White People shall settle them for nothing, we will sprinkle the Leaves with their Blood, or Die every Man of us in the attempt.” Such a knife’s edge of tension was not a state of affairs that could absorb much more drama without spiraling out of control.