Seven Years’ War ended officially in 1763 with the Peace of Paris and subsequent consolidation of British control over North America, but relations between natives and colonists continued to deteriorate. The new British administration nullified previous treaties between Indians and the French, canceled long-standing rites, banned gift giving, halted the sale of liquor and weapons, and restricted trade. Natives across the Northeast retaliated. Led by a visionary Ottawa named Pontiac, who vowed to drive the English “into the sea,” they attacked forts, cut communication lines, and terrorized colonists. By the summer of 1763, Pontiac’s War had claimed more than a hundred British lives. The citizens of Lancaster, as elsewhere, feared “the extermination of us all,” as Lancaster County magistrate Edward Shippen put it.
That September, nearly four dozen white settlers were murdered in eastern Pennsylvania. Paxton’s John Elder implored the governor, John Penn, grandson of William, to remove the Conestogas from Lancaster and replace their log huts with a garrison. Penn replied that the Indians of Conestoga were “innocent, helpless, and dependent upon the Governor for support,” and he could not remove them “without adequate cause.” In October, Elder’s rangers found the mutilated corpses of nine colonists along the upper Susquehanna River, and Elder again called for the area to be cleared of Indians.
Just over twenty Conestogas were left. They included an old man named Sheehays, whose father was said to have negotiated with William Penn. In late November, the Conestogas sent John Penn a letter reminding him of the friendship they had enjoyed with his grandfather and again seeking help: “As we have always lived in Peace and Quietness with our Brethren and Neighbours round us during the last and present Indian Wars, we hope now, as we are deprived from supporting our families by hunting, as we formerly did, you will consider our distressed situation, and grant our women and children some cloathing to cover them this winter.” The letter reached Penn on December 19, five days too late.
Elder’s rangers struck at dawn on Wednesday, December 14, 1763. Armed with hatchets, swords, and flintlocks, between fifty and sixty of them rode through the countryside from Paxton to reach Conestoga Town by daybreak. Deep snow covered the sleeping Indian village, and more snow was falling. Only seven Conestogas were home that morning; the rest had left to peddle wares to farmers in the neighborhood. The Paxton men broke into the Indian cabins and murdered six of the Conestogas—a seventh escaped—then plundered the threadbare village and burned what was left of it to the ground.
The ratio of killer to victim was nearly ten to one, and the butchery must have been extreme. Benjamin Franklin, who was miles away in Philadelphia at the time of the massacre but later decried it, claimed the Paxton “boys” scalped and “otherwise horribly mangled” their victims. The killers rode off in the snow with their bloody weapons, and no one stopped them. When local officials arrived on the scene, they found a smoking ruin strewn with charred corpses. One of the dead was Sheehays, who had so trusted the descendants of William Penn that he once declared, “The English will wrap me in their Matchcoat and secure me from all Danger.” Also dead was his son, Ess-canesh.
As they winnowed the debris at Conestoga, officials reportedly found a bag containing two wampum belts and several documents, one of them Penn’s original treaty with the Conestogas. Drafted and signed in Philadelphia in 1701, it promised unending “Friendship and Amity as one People.” Like so much else, this document too would disappear.
Nine miles away from the Indian village, in the borough of Columbia, the children of Quaker sheriff Robert Barber Jr. learned of the killings and were heartstricken. Barber’s children had often played with the children of the Conestogas and were so attached to one Indian boy they thought of him as a brother. Seventy years later, Barber’s adult children were still unable to talk about the event.
Fourteen Conestogas survived the slaughter in their village. Officials promptly rounded them up, took them to Lancaster, and locked them inside the city’s workhouse for their protection. Eight of the jailed were children; six were married adults.
To build a limestone wall in the eighteenth century, you first had to bore holes into a stretch of bedrock, then insert iron wedges into those holes and gently drive them deeper into the earth’s surface, and finally, with the sharp edge of a sledgehammer, “strike hard on the rock in the line between every wedge,” as a Pennsylvania stonecutter described the process, until the limestone cracked and eventually opened, like a fruit. In this manner quarriers worked their way down the crust of the earth, axes and hammers ringing. They used iron levers and bars, and sometimes sledges or stoneboats, to haul massive chunks of rock up ramps that led to the top of the quarry, where masons waited with chisels. Once hewn into rough blocks, these souvenirs of geologic time were carted off to construction sites in nascent American cities, laid side by side in long rows, one on top of the next, and secured with lime-sand mortar, the recipe for which dated back to Vitruvius.
In 1745, the commissioners of the newly incorporated town of Lancaster, Pennsylvania, had hired a mason named James Webb to construct a series of such walls on a half acre of land bounded by King, Prince, and Water Streets. The property had been given to Lancaster by the town’s founder, Andrew Hamilton, a Philadelphia lawyer and the eventual designer of Independence Hall, for the purpose of erecting a jail to house “felons, vagrants, and loose and idle persons.” A log prison had stood on the site for fifteen years, but the people of Lancaster wanted something stronger, so Webb went to work. By 1746, he and his fellow laborers had completed a stone jail; some years later the building was expanded to include an adjoining workhouse. It was to this compound the fourteen Conestogas were brought on December 14, 1763.
I don’t know when I first learned about the connection between the Conestoga Indians and the Fulton Theatre. I remember seeing a movie version of The Mikado at the Fulton in elementary school, when the theater was a rundown firetrap. Maybe I learned about the Indians then. By the time I went to work in the Fulton a decade later, I knew. Sitting in the greenroom, surrounded by stone, stories swirled: Do you know what happened here? Can you feel it? The place has a chill, and it’s not just the thermostat setting. Spend time in this room, as actors inevitably do, and you get sucked into the saga. Hear that noise? It’s the rumble of wagon wheels on the dirt road outside the prison, it’s the clang of the jailer’s keys.
Authorities claimed they were incarcerating the Indians for their safety, but it’s equally clear they were protecting themselves. The county magistrate, Edward Shippen, reasoned that had it not been snowing on the day Elder’s rangers raided Conestoga, the Indians who survived the attack might well have embarked on a murderous rampage against their white neighbors. Shippen had long feared tensions with the Indians would lead to a civil war. A businessman and slave owner with a predilection for Renaissance literature and religious texts, he had briefly been an Indian trader and harbored his share of bigotry. Shippen and other Lancastrians urged provincial officials to remove the fourteen Conestogas from Lancaster and confine them on an island outside Philadelphia, where more than a hundred displaced Delaware were already being housed. Even the Conestogas begged to be taken to Philadelphia. But they stayed in Lancaster.
Outside the prison complex, colonists in their wood and brick houses were preparing to celebrate Christmas. Inside, the Indians were alone except for a jailer who fed them and built them fires. It’s not hard to imagine their plight: cold, helpless, deprived of “necessaries and apparel,” in mourning for their murdered companions and afraid of what lay ahead. I’d like to think some charitable citizen came around to the jail with a gift of food or apparel, or remembered the Indians in his prayers, but there’s no record of it.
On December 19, Governor John Penn ordered the capture and arrest of the men who had attacked Conestoga Town, but before his proclamation could be published Elder’s men attacked again. Edward Shippen was attending services in the sanctuary of Saint James Episcopal Church in downtown Lancaster on Tuesday afternoon, December 27, when the doors to the building burst open, and he heard shouts outside: “Paxton boys!” “Murder!” “The prison is attacked!” “They are murdering
