MD3PAD 304-306

[Toby G Levy]

        The snow this late December morning is ankle deep and the street
seems deserted.  It is a Wednesday and should be jammed at that time of
day. They decide to look for news at a nearby coffee house, The Restless
Bee.

vw#74: Susurrus - A soft, whispering or rustling sound; a murmur.

        Moving toward the tavern they begin to hear normal everyday
sounds in the distance. In front of the Bee they see a circle of people
surrounding two fighters, one apparently a Quaker, the other apparently
a Presbyterian. Dixon asks one of the people in the crowd to explain
what is happening. The person Dixon addresses is a lawyer named Mr.
Chantry.  He tells Mason and Dixon of the Paxton massacre at Lancaster a
couple of days ago.  Here's the Wikipedia history of the events:

"The Paxton Boys were a group of back country Scotch-Irish frontiersmen
from the area around the central Pennsylvania village of Paxtang
(Paxton) who formed a vigilante group in response to the American Indian
uprising known as Pontiac's Rebellion. The Paxton boys felt that the
government of colonial Pennsylvania, dominated by Quaker pacifists, was
negligent in providing them with protection, and so decided to take
matters into their own hands.

"As the nearest belligerent Indians were some 200 miles west of Paxton,
the men turned their anger towards the local Conestoga (or
Susquehannock) Indians-many of them Christians-who lived peacefully in
small enclaves in the midst of white Pennsylvania settlements. (The
Paxton Boys believed or claimed to believe that these Indians secretly
provided aid and intelligence to the hostile Indians.) On December 14,
1763 a group of more than fifty Paxton Boys marched on an Indian village
and murdered the six Indians they found there, and burned the bloody
cabin in which the killings were done. Later, colonists looking through
the ashes of the cabin, found a bag containing the Conestoga's 1701
treaty signed by William Penn, which pledged that the colonists and the
Indians "shall forever hereafter be as one Head & One Heart, & live in
true Friendship & Amity as one People."

"The remaining fourteen Susquehannocks were placed in protective custody
by Governor John Penn in Lancaster. But on December 27, Paxton Boys
broke into the workhouse at Lancaster and brutally killed and mutilated
all fourteen. These two actions, which resulted in the deaths of all but
two of the last of the Susquehannocks, are sometimes known as the
"Conestoga Massacre". The Governor issued bounties for the arrest of the
murderers, but no one came forward to identify them."

        Dixon's sympathy for the Indians puts him in some danger of
assault by the onlookers, so Mr. Chantry escorts them into the coffee
house. THe place is a hotbed of activity, all relating the the Paxton
boys. There are a group of indians converted by the Moravian Brothers
living near Philadelphia and these are thought to be the next target of
the paxton boys and some of the people in the coffee house were
organizing to oppose them.

        Mason and Dixon are appalled by the savagery of America. They
are reminded of the cruelty of the Dutch in Capetown. Dixon refers to
the Dutch as "Butter-Bags," which the Hyperarts alpha states is a
"somewhat derogatory slang for a Dutchman."

        They had not paid much attention to the first report of the
Paxton boys two weeks ago because they were busy taking their first
observations in the new observatory.

Toby