of him as a brother. Seventy years later, Barber’s adult children were still unable to talk about the event.
Fourteen Conestogas survived the slaughter in their village. Officials promptly rounded them up, took them to Lancaster, and locked them inside the city’s workhouse for their protection. Eight of the jailed were children; six were married adults.
To build a limestone wall in the eighteenth century, you first had to bore holes into a stretch of bedrock, then insert iron wedges into those holes and gently drive them deeper into the earth’s surface, and finally, with the sharp edge of a sledgehammer, “strike hard on the rock in the line between every wedge,” as a Pennsylvania stonecutter described the process, until the limestone cracked and eventually opened, like a fruit. In this manner quarriers worked their way down the crust of the earth, axes and hammers ringing. They used iron levers and bars, and sometimes sledges or stoneboats, to haul massive chunks of rock up ramps that led to the top of the quarry, where masons waited with chisels. Once hewn into rough blocks, these souvenirs of geologic time were carted off to construction sites in nascent American cities, laid side by side in long rows, one on top of the next, and secured with lime-sand mortar, the recipe for which dated back to Vitruvius.
In 1745, the commissioners of the newly incorporated town of Lancaster, Pennsylvania, had hired a mason named James Webb to construct a series of such walls on a half acre of land bounded by King, Prince, and Water Streets. The property had been given to Lancaster by the town’s founder, Andrew Hamilton, a Philadelphia lawyer and the eventual designer of Independence Hall, for the purpose of erecting a jail to house “felons, vagrants, and loose and idle persons.” A log prison had stood on the site for fifteen years, but the people of Lancaster wanted something stronger, so Webb went to work. By 1746, he and his fellow laborers had completed a stone jail; some years later the building was expanded to include an adjoining workhouse. It was to this compound the fourteen Conestogas were brought on December 14, 1763.
I don’t know when I first learned about the connection between the Conestoga Indians and the Fulton Theatre. I remember seeing a movie version of The Mikado at the Fulton in elementary school, when the theater was a rundown firetrap. Maybe I learned about the Indians then. By the time I went to work in the Fulton a decade later, I knew. Sitting in the greenroom, surrounded by stone, stories swirled: Do you know what happened here? Can you feel it? The place has a chill, and it’s not just the thermostat setting. Spend time in this room, as actors inevitably do, and you get sucked into the saga. Hear that noise? It’s the rumble of wagon wheels on the dirt road outside the prison, it’s the clang of the jailer’s keys.
Authorities claimed they were incarcerating the Indians for their safety, but it’s equally clear they were protecting themselves. The county magistrate, Edward Shippen, reasoned that had it not been snowing on the day Elder’s rangers raided Conestoga, the Indians who survived the attack might well have embarked on a murderous rampage against their white neighbors. Shippen had long feared tensions with the Indians would lead to a civil war. A businessman and slave owner with a predilection for Renaissance literature and religious texts, he had briefly been an Indian trader and harbored his share of bigotry. Shippen and other Lancastrians urged provincial officials to remove the fourteen Conestogas from Lancaster and confine them on an island outside Philadelphia, where more than a hundred displaced Delaware were already being housed. Even the Conestogas begged to be taken to Philadelphia. But they stayed in Lancaster.
Outside the prison complex, colonists in their wood and brick houses were preparing to celebrate Christmas. Inside, the Indians were alone except for a jailer who fed them and built them fires. It’s not hard to imagine their plight: cold, helpless, deprived of “necessaries and apparel,” in mourning for their murdered companions and afraid of what lay ahead. I’d like to think some charitable citizen came around to the jail with a gift of food or apparel, or remembered the Indians in his prayers, but there’s no record of it.
On December 19, Governor John Penn ordered the capture and arrest of the men who had attacked Conestoga Town, but before his proclamation could be published Elder’s men attacked again. Edward Shippen was attending services in the sanctuary of Saint James Episcopal Church in downtown Lancaster on Tuesday afternoon, December 27, when the doors to the building burst open, and he heard shouts outside: “Paxton boys!” “Murder!” “The prison is attacked!” “They are murdering the Indians!” Shippen had been warned a few nights before that a “parcel of Rioters” from Paxton was in the area, and he had dispatched a pair of constables to investigate. (The jailer had been sufficiently worried that he’d armed himself and sent his children away from the prison.) But Shippen’s men reported no signs of trouble.
Now the magistrate hurried to the workhouse. It was only a few blocks away, but by the time Shippen got there, the attackers had escaped and all fourteen Conestogas were dead. The killings had taken less than fifteen minutes. On their way out of town, the fifty to sixty men who’d carried out the assault rode around the Lancaster courthouse on horseback, “hooping and hallowing” and firing their guns into the air.
Roused by the commotion, Lancastrians streamed to the prison complex. Inside, they found what Shippen, invoking the Renaissance language he loved, termed a “Tragical scene.” Beside one door lay the bodies of Will Sock and his wife, and on top of them the corpses of two children no older than three, whose heads had been split open and scalps peeled off. Another Indian was sprawled against the west wall of the workhouse. He had been shot in the chest, his legs sliced and hands amputated, and a rifle discharged in his mouth. “His head was blown to atoms, and the brains were splashed against, and yet hanging to the wall, for three or four feet around,” said a shopkeeper’s son who raced to the scene. “In this manner lay the whole of them, men, women and children, spread about the prison yard: shot, scalped, hacked and cut to pieces.” In minutes, the Paxton frontiersmen had slaughtered the last collective body of indigenous people to inhabit Lancaster County while the land was still a wilderness.
Residents carried the Indian corpses from the workhouse into the street and eventually buried them in a Mennonite cemetery a few blocks from the workhouse. Days later, jailer Felix Donnally submitted a bill to the county for his services feeding and maintaining the Indians from the 14th to the 27th of December, and for the “Trouble and Expense of having the said Fourteen Indians carried to the grave and interred.”
“My Indian Book” does not relate this part of the story. The booklet ends with a vision of bluebirds singing and a sun god painting the sky “beautiful shades of red and gold.” I suppose that’s what I was taught. The history of Indians in America was one of high drama and some suffering, but in the end things worked out the way they were supposed to. This was ten years before the founding of the American Indian Movement and the occupation of Wounded Knee, some twenty years before the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act, and forty years before the opening of the National American Indian Museum in Washington, D.C. Although my stepchildren would learn about the Paxton killings in their eleventh-grade American history class in Ann Arbor, Michigan, I was not taught that the history of aboriginal extermination on this continent had its origins in my hometown, much less in a building on which I would come to pin my adolescent hopes.
In the aftermath of the murders, Edward Shippen went to vast lengths to absolve himself and his fellow magistrates of blame. Paxton’s John Elder did the same. In a letter to John Penn, Elder insisted he’d tried to prevent both attacks on the Conestogas. “I expostulated, but life and reason were set at defiance, and yet the men in private life are virtuous, and respectable; not cruel, but mild and merciful.” He accused others of having mutilated the Conestogas’ bodies in order to blacken the image of the Paxton rangers. Penn ordered Elder to suppress further insurrections, and he stripped the minister of his office as a colonel in the provincial military. The governor commanded Shippen to get the names of the Paxton ringleaders, and he issued a proclamation, with a bounty, calling for the killers’ immediate apprehension. No arrests were ever made.
A reconstituted Paxton gang set out in late January 1764 to attack the Delaware under Penn’s protection in Philadelphia. The rangers were stopped just outside the capital by Benjamin Franklin, among others, who arrived with five hundred armed men and a delegation of provincial officials and clergymen. Leaders of the two sides met in a