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Bay].” Although this might have looked clear enough in London, it bore no relation to the realities of American geography. Drawn out on the ground, Pennsylvania’s southern border would have left Philadelphia deep inside Maryland.
    Pennsylvania was not unique in being overwhelmed. In the Carolinas, the proprietorial system of surveys gave way under the flood of incomers in the 1720s, and as Carolinians moved south into Georgia in search of uncontrolled land, they then brought down James Oglethorpe’s idealistic dream of building a society there for veterans and poor farmers around pre-surveyed property. Similar strains emerged in New York as new arrivals clashed with well-established patroons over the extent of their manors and their powers in the Hudson Valley, and on the New England frontier the governments of Massachusetts and New York found their power flouted by settlers moving into what would become Maine and Vermont. But nowhere did the impact of immigration occur more dramatically than in Pennsylvania.
    No one exploited the confusion of Pennsylvania’s frontier to better effect than Thomas Cresap , the founder of Oldtown. It pointed to the change inEllicott’s feelings about the wilderness that when he next passed through the settlement, he called on the man who was a legend among the frontier’s banditti, and living testament to the importance of clearly defined boundaries. “He is now more than 100 Years Old,” Ellicott reported with admiration, “he lost his Eye sight about 18 months ago, but his other faculties are yet unimpaired, his sense Strong and Manly, and his Ideas flow with ease.”
    By most accounts, Cresap was in fact ninety-one and would live another five years, a tribute to the healthiness of the outlaw’s life. From his arrival in 1710 as a sixteen-year-old from England, his past was a history of eighteenth-century America. He came as part of the flood of immigrants that overwhelmed the colonial governments’ plan to settle them within defined limits. For the first time, most of the immigrants to British America were not English and were quite prepared to defy the English common law that underpinned the ownership of land in the colonies. People with names like Paxton, Crockett, and Houston from northern Ireland, and German-speaking Wetzels and Weisers from the Rhine Valley, simply ignored the law and divided up the western land themselves.
    Taking advantage of the confusion, Cresap made a specialty of registering in Maryland claims to land that lay in Pennsylvania and selling it to German immigrants whose lack of English left them unsure of what was happening. In his home state of Maryland his activities earned him the name the Border Ruffian, but elsewhere he was more generally known as the Maryland Monster. He farmed one such claim himself, close to Oldtown and lying well inside modern Pennsylvania. In 1736, when Pennsylvania settlers who had bought the same land from the Penns arrived to claim their property, Cresap drove them off at gunpoint. The settlers retaliated by bringing in Sheriff Samuel Smith, from Lancaster, Pennsylvania, but he was greeted by bullets flying round his ears. On his next visit, the sheriff took the precaution of arriving with a posse of fifty-five heavily armed farmers and succeeded in cornering Cresap and fourteen companions in his house.
    According to Smith’s deposition, when called upon to surrender, “Cresap, with several horrid oaths and the most abusive language against the proprietor and people of Pennsylvania, answered that they should never have him until he was a corpse.” A furious gun battle broke out, and as the sheriff later recalled, “They would not surrender but kept firing out ‘till the House was set on fire.” Despite his defiant promise, Cresap was amongthe outlaws who eventually gave themselves up, singed but unrepentant. As he was marched in chains through the streets of