McKean County and the Bucktail Sharpshooters

McKean County was carved out of Lycoming County in eighteen oh four, named for Governor Thomas McKean, one of Pennsylvania's signers of the Declaration of Independence. The county seat at Smethport was incorporated in eighteen fifty-three, a small town in the densely forested highlands of northern Pennsylvania. When the Civil War came in eighteen sixty-one, McKean County sent a company, the McKean Rifles, into one of the Union Army's most celebrated units: the Bucktails, formally the Thirteenth Pennsylvania Reserve Regiment, also called the First Pennsylvania Rifles.

These were backwoods hunters and sharpshooters who wore the tail of a white-tailed deer in their caps as a mark of distinction. They earned a fierce reputation for marksmanship and woodland fighting across campaigns from Antietam to the Wilderness. The county was sustained by oil, natural gas, and timber through the nineteenth century, industries that made this remote corner of Pennsylvania briefly one of the most economically consequential places in the state.