area, and he had dispatched a pair of constables to investigate. (The jailer had been sufficiently worried that he’d armed himself and sent his children away from the prison.) But Shippen’s men reported no signs of trouble.
Now the magistrate hurried to the workhouse. It was only a few blocks away, but by the time Shippen got there, the attackers had escaped and all fourteen Conestogas were dead. The killings had taken less than fifteen minutes. On their way out of town, the fifty to sixty men who’d carried out the assault rode around the Lancaster courthouse on horseback, “hooping and hallowing” and firing their guns into the air.
Roused by the commotion, Lancastrians streamed to the prison complex. Inside, they found what Shippen, invoking the Renaissance language he loved, termed a “Tragical scene.” Beside one door lay the bodies of Will Sock and his wife, and on top of them the corpses of two children no older than three, whose heads had been split open and scalps peeled off. Another Indian was sprawled against the west wall of the workhouse. He had been shot in the chest, his legs sliced and hands amputated, and a rifle discharged in his mouth. “His head was blown to atoms, and the brains were splashed against, and yet hanging to the wall, for three or four feet around,” said a shopkeeper’s son who raced to the scene. “In this manner lay the whole of them, men, women and children, spread about the prison yard: shot, scalped, hacked and cut to pieces.” In minutes, the Paxton frontiersmen had slaughtered the last collective body of indigenous people to inhabit Lancaster County while the land was still a wilderness.
Residents carried the Indian corpses from the workhouse into the street and eventually buried them in a Mennonite cemetery a few blocks from the workhouse. Days later, jailer Felix Donnally submitted a bill to the county for his services feeding and maintaining the Indians from the 14th to the 27th of December, and for the “Trouble and Expense of having the said Fourteen Indians carried to the grave and interred.”
“My Indian Book” does not relate this part of the story. The booklet ends with a vision of bluebirds singing and a sun god painting the sky “beautiful shades of red and gold.” I suppose that’s what I was taught. The history of Indians in America was one of high drama and some suffering, but in the end things worked out the way they were supposed to. This was ten years before the founding of the American Indian Movement and the occupation of Wounded Knee, some twenty years before the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act, and forty years before the opening of the National American Indian Museum in Washington, D.C. Although my stepchildren would learn about the Paxton killings in their eleventh-grade American history class in Ann Arbor, Michigan, I was not taught that the history of aboriginal extermination on this continent had its origins in my hometown, much less in a building on which I would come to pin my adolescent hopes.
In the aftermath of the murders, Edward Shippen went to vast lengths to absolve himself and his fellow magistrates of blame. Paxton’s John Elder did the same. In a letter to John Penn, Elder insisted he’d tried to prevent both attacks on the Conestogas. “I expostulated, but life and reason were set at defiance, and yet the men in private life are virtuous, and respectable; not cruel, but mild and merciful.” He accused others of having mutilated the Conestogas’ bodies in order to blacken the image of the Paxton rangers. Penn ordered Elder to suppress further insurrections, and he stripped the minister of his office as a colonel in the provincial military. The governor commanded Shippen to get the names of the Paxton ringleaders, and he issued a proclamation, with a bounty, calling for the killers’ immediate apprehension. No arrests were ever made.
A reconstituted Paxton gang set out in late January 1764 to attack the Delaware under Penn’s protection in Philadelphia. The rangers were stopped just outside the capital by Benjamin Franklin, among others, who arrived with five hundred armed men and a delegation of provincial officials and clergymen. Leaders of the two sides met in a tavern to hammer out a settlement, and the Paxton men backed down. It scarcely mattered: smallpox soon ravaged the barracks where the Delaware were held, and fifty-six Indians died.
The slaughter in Lancaster deepened tensions between Quaker authorities in Philadelphia and their non-Quaker constituents—many of them Scots-Irish Presbyterians—on the Pennsylvania frontier. It also gave rise to a pamphlet war. Franklin weighed in with A Narrative of the Late Massacres in Lancaster County, in which he argued that just because some Indians had murdered some settlers, other settlers had no right to avenge those deaths by killing blameless Indians. The Philadelphia printer and essayist had visited Lancaster County on several occasions and was familiar with the Conestogas. He could imagine the scene in the workhouse: “When the poor Wretches saw they had no Protection nigh, nor could possibly escape, and being without the least Weapon for Defence, they divided into their little Families, the Children clinging to the Parents; they fell on their Knees, protested their Innocence, declared their Love to the English, and that, in their whole Lives, they had never done them Injury; and in this Posture they all received the Hatchet!” No civilized nation in Europe would commit such an atrocity, Franklin observed. “Do we come to America to learn and practise the Manners of Barbarians?”
During the next months, upwards of sixty pamphlets and squibs for and against the so-called Paxton rebellion were printed and distributed, or read aloud, in taverns and coffeehouses throughout Philadelphia and as far west as Lancaster—a quantity sufficient to move Philadelphia ahead of Boston as the colony’s top publisher. Several pamphlets took the form of dialogues—primitive American theater. It’s as if the ground where the Conestogas died was fated to become sacral space. A friend who works at the Fulton remarked by e-mail when I told him about the dialogues, “It almost makes the building of a theater on the site of the massacre a touch of destiny and a haunting sort of justice.”
ANDREW TRUEMAN: Whar ha’ you been aw this Time, Tom?
THOMAS ZEALOT: Whar I have been! Whar you should ha’ been too, Andrew, fechting the Lord’s Battles, and killing the Indians at Lancaster and Cannestogoe.
TRUEMAN: How mony did you kill at Cannestogoe.
ZEALOT: Ane and Twunty.
TRUEMAN: Hoot Man, there were but twunty awthegether, and fourteen of them were in the Gaol.
ZEALOT: I tell you, we shot six and a wee ane, that was in the Squaw’s Belly; we sculped three; we tomhawked three; we roasted three and a wee ane; and three and a wee ane we gave to the Hogs; and is not that ane and twunty you Fool.
On the sixth and seventh pages of this slender tract, entitled A Dialogue Between Andrew Trueman and Thomas Zealot, About the Killing of the Indians at Cannestogoe and Lancaster, the pious Trueman speaks for those, like Franklin, who denounced the workhouse carnage: “I am afraid all this is wrong. I am a Presbyterian, you know, as well as yourself. But I wold fain hope that I am a Christian also.”
Every theater has its ghosts, and every performance raises the specter of past performances, but the Fulton strikes me as uniquely haunted. A plaque marking the scene of the Paxton massacre hangs outside the theater, on Water Street. For several years a second plaque hung inside the Fulton greenroom on one of the stone walls James Webb built. It read in part, “They were not guilty of any crime other than being at this place during that turbulent time.” Eventually the plaque was moved upstairs to the theater’s administrative offices, so now you have to go to the third floor of the building to see it, but people do. We’re drawn to the sites of savagery—Gettysburg, Little Big Horn, Ground Zero—even though we’re sometimes disappointed by the banality of what we find there. Life, as they say, goes on.
In its own day, the Lancaster workhouse and jail became a tourist attraction. One year after the Paxton killings, the British astronomer and surveyor Charles Mason visited the massacre site. “What brought me here was my curiosity to see the place where was perpetrated last Winter the Horrid and inhuman murder of 26 Indians, Men, Women and Children, leaving none alive to tell,” he wrote in his journal.
