History of Western Maryland. J. Thomas Scharf
party divided; the detachment under Brent found a wigwam belonging to some of the Doage tribe, surrounded it, and summoned the inmates to come forth. A chief obeyed, and was at once shot dead by Brent. The others within rushed forth, and all, ten in number, were shot down, only a boy being spared. In the meantime Mason's party had also found and surrounded a wigwam, and as the Indians came out at his summons they were fired on and fourteen killed, the firing only ceasing when a chief running up to Mason called out that they were Susquehannoughs and friends. The survivors denied all knowledge of the murder, which they said had been done by a marauding band of Senecas. Shortly after this several other murders were committed on both sides of the river, and terror and excitement prevailed. Disbelieving the innocence of the Susquehannoughs, or desirous of ridding themselves of their neighborhood, the Marylanders and Virginians organized a joint attack upon their fortress, the Virginia troops being led by Col. John Washington (great-grandfather of Gen. George Washington), Col. Mason, and Maj. Alderton, and the Marylanders by Maj. Thomas Trueman, one of the Governor's Council. The Maryland force were assisted by Piscataway', Chaptico, Matawoman, Pamunky, and Nansemy Indians. On Sunday morning, Sept. 25, 1675, the Maryland troops appeared before the fort, summoned the chiefs to a parley, and charged them with the recent murders, which they solemnly denied, laying the blame on the Senecas. These, they said, were now near the head of the Patapsco, and they offered guides for their pursuit. During the conference the Virginians had joined the Marylanders, and their commanders reiterated the charges, which the Indians persisted in denying, insisting that they were friends, and as proof of their assertions showing a silver medal with a black and yellow ribbon — the Baltimore colors — and certain papers which had been given them by Governor Calvert as a safe-conduct and pledge of amity. Trueman, it is said, professed himself satisfied of their innocence, and promised that no harm should befall them. On the following morning, however, Capt. Allen, who had been sent to one of the scenes of recent murder, returned, bringing with him the bodies of the victims, and arrived at the camp while the conference was being hell with the chiefs. The passions of the militiamen were roused to fury by the sight of the mangled bodies, and the Virginia officers demanded the instant execution of the chiefs. Col. Washington, according to the testimony of a witness, being particularly furious, shouting, " What! should we keep them any longer? Let us knock them on the head."
Despite the reluctance of Trueman, five of the chiefs were bound, led away, and tomahawked, one only being spared. The remainder in the fort bravely defended themselves for six weeks, after which time, their provisions giving out, they made their escape by night.
For this breach of faith Maj. Trueman was cited before the bar of the Lower House, and Robert Carville, attorney-general, Messrs. Burgess, Cheseldyn, Stephens, and others brought in articles of impeachment against him, addressed to the proprietary, and supported by affidavits. These charge, first, that he caused the chiefs to be seized and executed after they had come out under assurance of safety, and had shown the paper and medal as evidence of their being friends to Maryland. Secondly, that he caused the execution without previously obtaining the proprietary's authority. Thirdly, that he failed to procure a signed declaration of the Virginia officers that the execution was by their advice and consent. They therefore conclude that Trueman had broken his commission and instructions, and pray his lordship and the Upper House " to take such order with the said Maj. Thomas Trueman as may be just and reasonable."
These articles and depositions being laid before the Upper House, Trueman was brought to trial on May 27, 1676, before the Lord Proprietary, Col. Samuel Chew, chancellor and secretary, and Cols. Wharton and Tailler, sitting as a court of impeachment, and it was voted, nemine contradicente, that the accused was guilty of the first article of impeachment, and the Upper House was requested to send a message to the Lower House, desiring them to draw a bill of attainder against him. The bill was at once drawn and sent to the Upper House, which on the 1st of June responded by a message saying that the penalties therein prescribed were far too light for " so horrid a crime" and breach of the public faith. That if Trueman escaped so lightly the justice and dignity of the province would be brought into contempt, and the Indians set an example of bad faith likely to have disastrous consequences. That, moreover, the Assembly will be looked upon as countenancing rather than abhorring the acts of Trueman.
To this the Lower House replied that circumstances were shown at the trial that extenuated the conduct of the accused; for instance, " the eager impetuosity of the whole field, as well Marylanders as Virginians, at the sight of the Christians murdered at Mr. Hinson's," the identification of several of the chiefs as the murderers, and the necessity of the act to prevent a meeting. They therefore refused to recede from their former position.
The Upper House on the 12th answered that the bill was an attainder only in name; that they never would consent " to inflict a pecuniary punishment upon a person accused of murder by one house and condemned by the other; and that it was against their privileges for the bill to be pressed on them any further." The Lower House unanimously decided that Trueman, though guilty of the charge, was not deserving of death, and the Upper House remaining firm, he escaped his deserved punishment. He was, however, dismissed from the Council.
It has been said that the Indians left in the fort after the massacre of the chiefs defended themselves until their provisions gave out and then escaped by night. They went with the fires of rage and revenge burning in their hearts, and marked their southward march by a track of devastation and slaughter. At least sixty settlers paid the penalty of that deed of treachery and cruelty. One of them was a servant of Nathaniel Bacon, of Virginia; and this aroused Bacon, a man of bold and adventurous spirit, to apply for a commission to raise and command a force against the Susquehannoughs, the consequences of which were the utter crushing of the tribe and the revolt which bears Bacon's name in Virginian history.
A remnant of the Susquehannoughs that had been carried off by the Iroquois in a war with that nation must have maintained a separate existence, for we find that Penn, in 1701, entered into a regular treaty with Conoodagtok, king of the Susquehannoughs, Minquays, or Conestoga Indians; but it would seem that on this occasion a representative from the Onondago tribe was present. As a subject tribe we meet with the Susquehannoughs for many years in the negotiations of the league, and though some of them appear to have been removed to Onoghguage, a little band remained at Conestoga, where, joined by some Nanticokes, they formed a small village. In 1763, we are told, " they were still at their old castle, numbering only twenty, inhabiting a cluster of squalid cabins, living by beggary and the sale of baskets, brooms, and wooden ladles. An Indian war (Pontiac's) then desolated the frontier, and the Paxton boys, suspecting these poor wretches, and finding in the Bible sufficient commission to destroy the heathen, attacked the village, and killed six of them, the only occupants at the time. The fourteen survivors were taken to Lancaster by the sheriff, and shut up in the jail-yard for protection, but they could not escape the Paxton boys, who, while the townspeople were at church, burst into the jail and massacred the helpless objects of their fury." Thus perished at the hands of a cowardly mob the last remnant of that once powerful and noble tribe which had lorded it over the whole of Maryland, and which had often vanquished the fiercest and most formidable of the Indian confederacies.
The Indians that roamed over the upper counties of Western Maryland belonged to the Shawanese tribe, a subdivision of the Algonquin group. According to a tradition of recent origin, the Shawnees, or Shawanese, were primarily identical with the Kickapoo nation; but they moved eastward, and a part are said to have remained in 1648 along the Fox River, while the main body, mot south of Lake Erie by the Iroquois, were driven to the banks of the Cumberland River.
The basin of the Cumberland River is marked by the earliest geographers as the locality of the Shawnese, who connected the southeastern Algonquins with the western, and there is authority for the statement that they were inhabitants of this territory before the settlement of the Europeans on the continent. In 1682, when Penn made his celebrated treaty with the Indians, in the neighborhood of the present city of Philadelphia, the Shawnees were a party to the treaty in common with other tribes who composed the great nation of Algonquins, and they must have been considered a very prominent band from the fact of their having preserved the treaty in their own possession, as we are informed that at a subsequent conference held with them and the Mingoes many years afterwards, probably in 1701, by the Governor of Pennsylvania, the Shawnees produced this treaty written on parchment.