whose waters gave rise to mammoth rocks inscribed with sacred messages.
Pushing south from its crop of Indian petroglyphs, the Susquehanna empties into the Chesapeake Bay, mapped by the English Captain John Smith, of Pocahontas fame, in the early 1600s. Smith pronounced the area a revelation and called the Indians whom he met at the mouth of the river “Susquehannocks.” They seemed to him giants, with calves that measured three-quarters of a yard around, though twentieth-century archaeologists would conclude that the average Susquehannock male stood just under 5'4". Of the Indians’ language, which he did not understand, Smith wrote, “It may well beseeme their proportions, sounding as a voyce in a vault.” The Susquehannocks wore animal skins and carried gifts, including swords and tobacco pipes. At their first encounter, they raised their hands to the sun, broke into song, and embraced Smith, who tried to push them away. They laid objects at his feet, and around his shoulders they placed a painted bear hide as well as other skins and a necklace of heavy white beads. They begged him to protect them from rival tribes.
Smith published his Map of Virginia in 1612, and for the next sixty years this document was the primary means by which British explorers understood the Chesapeake and its precolonial inhabitants. Among the Indians Smith identified was a group called the Conestogas. These too were Susquehannock people, whom French fur traders had labeled “Andastes” or “Gandastogues.” They lived east of the Susquehanna River, many in and around what would become Lancaster County, and their footpaths crisscrossed the land. Smith and his compatriots anglicized their name and eventually used it to denote the places where these Indians dwelt.
I grew up in a suburban neighborhood in eastern Lancaster County, a few hundred yards from Stauffer’s Run, a tributary of the Conestoga River and by extension the Susquehanna. Without realizing it, I was treading on Indian ground whenever I went outdoors to play. I was intrigued by arrowheads, to be sure, and envied the few people I knew who’d found one. By rights I should have been among them; our neighborhood was under constant construction while I was growing up, with pits of earth ripe for excavation, but I wasn’t interested. By the time I graduated from high school, the field across the street from my parents’ house had become a grid of manicured lawns, two with swimming pools and one with its own tennis court. The Conestoga River meandered along a golf course on the far side of the neighborhood, and I often crossed it on a footbridge on my way to the country club to go swimming. I knew nothing about the origins of the word “Conestoga,” except that it had lent itself to my high school, Conestoga Valley, and a century before that to the huge red, white, and blue wagons that helped settle the American West. Other than “My Indian Book,” I don’t recall learning much of anything about Native Americans in school. History began with the Pilgrims, and I sketched them over and over again, cheerful faces in funny hats and stiff white collars. But at some point it catches up with you. Fall in love with a building, and the next thing you know, you’re wondering what happened to the Indians.
The simple answer is: they vanished. The Conestogas who inhabited my county clung to the hope of peaceful coexistence with their European neighbors for more than a hundred years and signed treaty after treaty, several in the brick courthouse on Lancaster’s main square. They met with William Penn, who pledged that the two groups “should always live as friends and brothers, and be as one body,” but his heirs betrayed Penn’s vision and continued to surge west, seizing Indian land as they went.
By 1745, when colonists in Lancaster began erecting a two-story limestone prison at the intersection of King and Prince Streets, one block west of the courthouse, European settlers had crossed the Susquehanna and were heading into the Alleghenies. The few Conestogas left in Lancaster County had taken up residence, along with the remnants of a half dozen other displaced and dying tribes, in a four-hundred-acre tract of land south of the city, known as Conestoga Town. Provincial officials authorized the area for use by the Conestogas—as the Indians who lived there were collectively known—“so long as they obeyed all the English conditions set forth therein.” Here, on this hilly spot a dozen miles from downtown Lancaster, the stories of the Fulton Theatre and the Conestoga Indians converge.
In my own lifetime the acreage where the Indians lived would metamorphose into a scraggly farm owned by a widow in her eighties named Betty Witmer, who for a while served as the local trash collector and dogcatcher. In 1972, a team of archaeologists cleared the topsoil from a thirty-two-thousand-square-foot piece of land on her property and found a half dozen storage pits, three houses, and five small cemeteries crammed with funerary objects, which they took to the state museum in Harrisburg for safekeeping. A couple of years ago, I met up with a neighbor of Betty’s who collects Indian artifacts, and with Betty’s blessing he and I spent a muggy June afternoon walking up and down one of her fields. I came away with a fragment of clay pipe, less than an inch long and plugged with soil, which now sits beside my computer in a little ceramic bowl where I’ve also placed three pieces of stone from the Fulton basement. I often finger and sometimes smell them, and from time to time I touch my tongue to each in the hope of recovering something, I’m not sure what. The pipe tastes of chalk, the stones vaguely of salt.
Shorn of the wilderness that had previously sustained them, the Indians of Conestoga Town spent their last decades peddling baskets and brooms to the European immigrants whose farms surrounded their bleak reservation. No longer the noble Susquehannocks of Smith’s day, nor even the buckskin-clad braves and squaws of “My Indian Book,” they subsisted mostly on corn. It was not unusual to see them wandering the countryside in rags or begging alms in downtown Lancaster. In 1750, the Conestogas petitioned the governor of Pennsylvania to let them relocate. “Many of our old people are dead, so that we are now left as it were orphans in a destitute condition, which inclines us to leave our old habitations,” they said. But nothing came of it.
Reading about the Conestogas, I’m not always sure what or whom to trust. Eighteenth-century provincial records chart a growing fissure between colonists and their Indian neighbors, but eyewitness reports are scarce; nineteenth- and twentieth-century historians shaped the story to suit their needs; the Indians themselves left no written account. But several thousand objects taken from Betty Witmer’s farm and now in the basement of the State Museum of Pennsylvania—among them coins, bottles, tools, combs, slivers of mirror, gun parts, spectacles, and a dozen crosses, at least one with a figure of Christ—suggest the extent to which the Conestogas relied on Europeans for their everyday needs.
The outbreak of the Seven Years’ War in 1754 set off a wave of violence across Pennsylvania. With the encouragement of their French allies, natives in the western part of the province attacked settlers and missionaries to the east. Colonists in Lancaster heard story after story of Indian atrocities: a woman stabbed to death while breastfeeding, a corpse with two tomahawks sunk into its skull, natives who drank the blood of children “like water.” Not far from Lancaster, four settlers were found scalped and butchered. There were rumors that “a great body” of Indians planned to launch a flotilla of canoes on the Susquehanna and invade Lancaster County. Locals talked of erecting a stockade. Vigilante groups sprang up throughout Pennsylvania province, spurred in part by a government offer of $130 bounty a head for Indian scalps. Forty miles northwest of Lancaster, near Harrisburg, members of a Presbyterian church in the frontier town of Paxton formed a posse of armed rangers under the leadership of a militant clergyman named John Elder.
At a treaty session in Lancaster in 1756, an elderly Conestoga told colonial authorities, “We have heard a great noise all about us and expected we should have been killed.” He pleaded for protection.
Fewer than fifty Conestogas remained. They were penniless and starving, but even so they inspired fear. Rumors spread that a young Conestoga named Will Sock was in cahoots with the French and had “murder in his heart.” “In the immediate neighborhood, they were commonly regarded as harmless vagabonds,” Francis Parkman would write of the Conestogas in his 1855 history of these events. “But elsewhere, a more unfavorable opinion was entertained, and they were looked upon as secretly abetting the enemy, acting as spies, giving shelter to scalping-parties, and even aiding them in their depredations.” Aware they were in
