Staging Ground. Leslie Stainton
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 danger, the Conestogas stopped traveling long distances to sell their goods.
The 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