Abstract
In January 1765, Charles Mason visited Lancaster, Pennsylvania,during winter holiday from his work on the Maryland-Pennsylvania
boundary line. "What brought me here," wrote Mason, "was my
curiosity to see the place where was perpetuated last Winter the Horrid
and inhuman murder of 26 Indians, Men, Women and Children, leaving
none alive to tell." The dead were Conestoga Indians who had "fled to the
Gaol" in Lancaster in a vain effort to escape the Indian-hating vigilantes
known as the Paxton Boys. The Paxton Boys broke into the jail and brutally
executed and dismembered the Conestogas, peaceful dependents on
the Pennsylvanian government and erstwhile neighbors of the Paxtons.
"Strange it was that the Town though as large as most Market Towns in
England, never offered to oppose them, . . . no honor to them!" The
Paxtons, it seems, were not alone in their anti-Indian sentiments.