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Philadelphia, he exclaimed to his guard, “Damn it, this is one of the prettiest towns in Maryland!”
    Released from his shackles, Cresap decided to settle legally in what would become Oldtown. According to his own account, he used to offer such hospitality to the Indians who came into western Pennsylvania to trade furs that they called him the Big Kettle. The seventeen-year-old George Washington, who took shelter with Cresap in 1749 on his way to survey Lord Fairfax’s five-million-acre estate across the border in Virginia, recorded being “agreeably surpris’d by the sight of thirty odd Indians coming from War with only one Scalp. We had some Liquor with us of which we gave them Part. It elevating there Spirits put them in the Humour of Dauncing of whom we had a War Daunce.”
    The war party almost certainly came from the Iroquois federation in the north, who were then engaged in long-term hostilities with the Catawbas in the Carolinas. But the contact with the Europeans was not untypical of what modern historians call “the borderland,” the ill-defined area where squatters, natives, fur dealers, and missionaries lived and bred, absorbing each other’s culture, and forming an uneasy, mutually rewarding, self-adjusting society.

    A memorial to Thomas Cresap in Cumberland, Maryland
    What none of them could have known was that the arrival of the apprentice surveyor working on behalf of his patron, Lord Fairfax, presaged the end of the borderland. The huge Fairfax property, almost amounting to a separate colony, stretched across the northern neck of Virginia up to the Maryland and Pennsylvania boundary. The previous year his lordship had employed Thomas Lewis and Peter Jefferson, father of the future third president, to map the southern boundary of his gigantic holding. With its outer limits defined, the task of his new team of surveyors, including Washington, was to establish who was living on the Fairfax estate and how many acres they were working. Squatters paid no rent, and Fairfax’s kingdom had to turn a profit. Within a few years of Washington’s survey, dozens of illegal settlers had either been evicted or had signed ninety-nine-year leases paying a rent of about $5 annually for one hundred acres. Fully surveyed, the Fairfax property might produce as much as $250,000 a year. The lesson did not go unheeded.
    â€œ The greatest Estates we have in this Colony ,” the young Washington confided to a friend, “were made … by taking up & purchasing at very low rates the rich back Lands which were thought nothing of in those days, but are now the most valuable Lands we possess.” In 1752, at the age of twenty, he purchased 1,459 acres in the Virginia Piedmont, the first step in a career of land-dealing that eventually made him owner of more than 52,000 acres spread across six different states.
    Washington was not alone. A growing number of speculators had come to the same electrifying conclusion that immigration was pushing up the value of land. In 1751, Benjamin Franklin predicted that the population of the colonies would double to 2.6 million by 1775. The logic was inescapable, and it led to the formation of more than a score of land companies to survey and register claims to unowned territory. The soaring value of property left no room for Cresaps or other banditti. In colonial legislatures throughout British America, landowners, speculators, and proprietors brought pressure to bear to impose order in the backcountry. New countieswere created, new county surveyors were appointed to register properties— among them George Washington for Culpeper County, Virginia—and new county sheriffs were sent to exact taxes.
    From the point of view of the eastern politicians and speculators, this was no more than a restoration of government. To western farmers forced to travel up to one hundred miles to pay taxes or appear in the new county courts, it appeared like