Frontier Country. Patrick Spero

      Early American Frontiers

      In January 1765, as Charles Mason and Jeremiah Dixon were busy surveying the line that now bears their names, a morbid “curiousity” led Charles to stop his work and take a journey to Lancaster, Pennsylvania. As he later recorded in his diary, it was “the place where was perpetrated last winter, the horrid and inhumane murder of 26 Indians: men, women, and children, leaving none alive to tell.” Mason had to see the site of this depravity to understand it.¹

      The brutal event that drew Mason to Lancaster is now known as the Paxton Boys’ Rebellion. It began in December 1763 when a group of colonists living outside of Lancaster massacred their neighbors, the Conestoga Indians, who resided on a nearby manor reserved for them by the Pennsylvania government. A couple of weeks after their initial assault, the Paxton Boys raided a building in Lancaster that housed the few surviving Conestogas, killing all alive. The murderers became rebels when hundreds of supporters joined them in a seventy-mile trek through the rough winter to Philadelphia, the colonial capital, to defend the Paxton Boys’ actions and protest what they saw as the government’s overly benevolent policy toward Native people. The march was likely the largest political mobilization in the history of colonial Pennsylvania.

      Mason was surprised by what he found when he visited. Lancaster was not some lawless frontier outpost, but instead a bustling and vibrant inland port. Its location a few miles from the Susquehanna River, a central artery that in 1763 connected the vast interior of North America to the Atlantic, meant that the town was an important waypoint for the British Empire as it expanded west across the Appalachian Mountains. Lancaster was “as large as most market towns in England,” Mason noted in his diary before leaving. He was right; it was the largest inland town in colonial America.²

      Mason’s trip took another unexpected turn a few days later when he met a fellow traveler named Samuel Smith. Smith told Mason a strange tale about Lancaster and its role in creating the border Mason was then in the business of surveying. About thirty years earlier, Smith recounted, Pennsylvania was “in open war” with Maryland over control of the Susquehanna and all lands to the west. Smith, who was the sheriff of Lancaster County at the time, controlled a militia that laid siege to the home of the leader of the Marylanders, one Mr. Cresap. In the ensuing melee, Cresap’s house was engulfed in flames, one Marylander died, and the Pennsylvanians captured and jailed Cresap and many of his men. Mason seemed surprised by Smith’s story of two neighboring colonies engaged in such a violent conflict. It is even more surprising that Mason was unaware of this “open war” because it had led to his current assignment. When the king heard that two of his colonies were fighting, he drew a temporary boundary between them. After a court case to settle the dispute, Mason was dispatched with Dixon to establish a permanent line.³

      During this brief but eventful trip to Pennsylvania, Mason encountered the twin problems that plagued the British Empire on its North American frontiers in the years before the American Revolution: establishing social harmony within the empire, especially between colonists and Native Americans, and creating borders between the polities that composed the empire. While Mason and Dixon were in the midst of marking a line between colonies, imperial officials were trying to create clearer boundaries between colonial settlements and Indians. Throughout the 1760s, officers of the British Empire hoped to stabilize relations with the Indians by