On Christmas Day in 1775, six months before the out-break of the war that would make the United States a nation, Americans in the Wyoming Valley of the Susque-hanna River, in what is now Pennsylvania, were already engaged under arms in a bitter fight among themselves. This little-known conflict is sometimes referred to as the Pennamite Wars.

The dispute had been growing since 1754 when an association of Connecticut residents purchased a parcel of land, which they intended to settle and farm, from the Six Nations at a tribal council in Albany "for 2,000 pounds of current money in New York." The association, calling itself the Susquehanna Company, at that time numbered fewer than six hundred souls. It was not for another ten years that they would begin to settle their land. By then, the Pennsylvania colony, which claimed the land as its own, and the Connecticut...