Lancaster

[Samuel Moyer]

>From _Walkin' The Line_ by William Ecengarger page 140-1. (M. Evans and Company, Inc. 2000)

On January 10, 1765, the off-season for the surveyors, Mason made a thirty-five mile journey on horseback to Lancaster, explaining in his journal: "What brought me here was my curiosity to see the place where was perpetrated last winter; the Horrid and inhumane murder of 26 Indians: men, Women and Children, leaving none alive to tell."

The incident had occurred some thirteen months earlier on December 14, 1763, at Conestoga, where a surviving remnant of the conestoga tribe was living under the putative protection of the colonial government. The Conestogas, a branch of the Susquehannocks, had been a large tribe when they were personally visited by William Penn and his son in 1701.  But only a handful remained sixty-two years later when a mob of fifty whites from Paxton, Pennsylvania, murdered six of the Indians - two women, three old me, and a young boy - burned their cabins, and paraded their scalps on long sticks.  Samuel Smith, the Lancaster County sheriff, locked up the remaining Indians for their own protection.

The so-called Paxton Boys returned to Lancaster on December 27, and, undeterred by the local population, broke into the jail and killed and scalped the remaining members of the Conestoga tribe - three old men, three women, five young boys, and three small girls (Mason had his numbers slightly wrong).  The terrified prisoners had proclaimed their love for the English, prostrated themselves, and begged for mercy.  The mangled bodies of the Indians, who were peaceful farmers and had never been at war witht he whites, were buried in Lancaster.  None of the Paxton boys was ever brought to justice, and the incident highlighted the growing inability of the colonial government to protect friendly Indians from what Benjamin Franklin called "white savages."

Mason's pilgramage to Lancaster moved him to uncharacteristically emotional prose in his Journal:

    These poor unhappy creatures had always lived under the protection 
    of the Pennsylvania Government, and had Lands allotted for them a
    few miles from Lancaster by the celebrated Wm. Penn, Esq'r,
    Proprietor... They had received notice of the intention of some of 
    the back inhabitants & fled in to ye Gaol to save themselves.
        Strange it was that (Lancaster), Tho' as Large as most market
    Towns in England, never offer'd to oppose them, tho' it's more
    than probable they on request might have been assisted by a 
    company of his Majesties Troops who were in the Town.
        No Honour to them!


Sam
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