where the Delaware were held, and fifty-six Indians died.
The slaughter in Lancaster deepened tensions between Quaker authorities in Philadelphia and their non-Quaker constituents—many of them Scots-Irish Presbyterians—on the Pennsylvania frontier. It also gave rise to a pamphlet war. Franklin weighed in with A Narrative of the Late Massacres in Lancaster County, in which he argued that just because some Indians had murdered some settlers, other settlers had no right to avenge those deaths by killing blameless Indians. The Philadelphia printer and essayist had visited Lancaster County on several occasions and was familiar with the Conestogas. He could imagine the scene in the workhouse: “When the poor Wretches saw they had no Protection nigh, nor could possibly escape, and being without the least Weapon for Defence, they divided into their little Families, the Children clinging to the Parents; they fell on their Knees, protested their Innocence, declared their Love to the English, and that, in their whole Lives, they had never done them Injury; and in this Posture they all received the Hatchet!” No civilized nation in Europe would commit such an atrocity, Franklin observed. “Do we come to America to learn and practise the Manners of Barbarians?”
During the next months, upwards of sixty pamphlets and squibs for and against the so-called Paxton rebellion were printed and distributed, or read aloud, in taverns and coffeehouses throughout Philadelphia and as far west as Lancaster—a quantity sufficient to move Philadelphia ahead of Boston as the colony’s top publisher. Several pamphlets took the form of dialogues—primitive American theater. It’s as if the ground where the Conestogas died was fated to become sacral space. A friend who works at the Fulton remarked by e-mail when I told him about the dialogues, “It almost makes the building of a theater on the site of the massacre a touch of destiny and a haunting sort of justice.”
ANDREW TRUEMAN: Whar ha’ you been aw this Time, Tom?
THOMAS ZEALOT: Whar I have been! Whar you should ha’ been too, Andrew, fechting the Lord’s Battles, and killing the Indians at Lancaster and Cannestogoe.
TRUEMAN: How mony did you kill at Cannestogoe.
ZEALOT: Ane and Twunty.
TRUEMAN: Hoot Man, there were but twunty awthegether, and fourteen of them were in the Gaol.
ZEALOT: I tell you, we shot six and a wee ane, that was in the Squaw’s Belly; we sculped three; we tomhawked three; we roasted three and a wee ane; and three and a wee ane we gave to the Hogs; and is not that ane and twunty you Fool.
On the sixth and seventh pages of this slender tract, entitled A Dialogue Between Andrew Trueman and Thomas Zealot, About the Killing of the Indians at Cannestogoe and Lancaster, the pious Trueman speaks for those, like Franklin, who denounced the workhouse carnage: “I am afraid all this is wrong. I am a Presbyterian, you know, as well as yourself. But I wold fain hope that I am a Christian also.”
Every theater has its ghosts, and every performance raises the specter of past performances, but the Fulton strikes me as uniquely haunted. A plaque marking the scene of the Paxton massacre hangs outside the theater, on Water Street. For several years a second plaque hung inside the Fulton greenroom on one of the stone walls James Webb built. It read in part, “They were not guilty of any crime other than being at this place during that turbulent time.” Eventually the plaque was moved upstairs to the theater’s administrative offices, so now you have to go to the third floor of the building to see it, but people do. We’re drawn to the sites of savagery—Gettysburg, Little Big Horn, Ground Zero—even though we’re sometimes disappointed by the banality of what we find there. Life, as they say, goes on.
In its own day, the Lancaster workhouse and jail became a tourist attraction. One year after the Paxton killings, the British astronomer and surveyor Charles Mason visited the massacre site. “What brought me here was my curiosity to see the place where was perpetrated last Winter the Horrid and inhuman murder of 26 Indians, Men, Women and Children, leaving none alive to tell,” he wrote in his journal. The inaccuracy of Mason’s numbers suggests the extent to which the facts of the case had already begun to morph into myth. Mason went on: “What was laid to the Indians charge was that they held a private correspondence with the Enemy Indians; but this could never be proved against the men, and the women and children (some in their Mothers wombs that never saw light) could not be guilty.”
Mason seems to have spent just a day in Lancaster, and it’s unclear whether his fellow surveyor, Jeremiah Dixon, went with him. Thomas Pynchon speculates that he did, and that at the murder site Dixon felt like a “nun before a Shrine.” Both Dixon and Mason had witnessed barbarity before—public executions, whippings, torture—but the Lancaster jail was somehow different, maybe because it signified a fundamental betrayal of the idea of America. “Is it something in this Wilderness, something ancient, that waited for them, and infected their Souls when they came?” Pynchon has Dixon ask.
Pynchon imagines the streets and corners around the jail brimming with activity during Mason’s visit: guides hawking tours; tourists with sketchbooks, easels, and specimen bags eager to document the crime scene, all drawn by “the same queer Magnetism.” By this account, the Lancaster workhouse was already on its way to becoming theater.
Mason jotted down his notes and went on his way plotting the line that would separate Pennsylvania from Maryland and eventually cleave a nation into North and South. Weeks after he visited Lancaster, five Cherokee were murdered as they slept in a barn in Virginia. Mason may have heard about these and subsequent killings in Detroit, Fort Pitt, New York, and Ohio. By the time he and Dixon finished charting their line in 1767, dozens of natives had been murdered and countless more were fleeing west. The two surveyors may have wondered what their boundary defined.
No one from the Paxton gang was ever punished for the murders of the Conestogas. John Elder retained his job as a Presbyterian minister until his death in 1792 and is today lionized on websites as the “fighting pastor of Paxton,” whose battle-ready parishioners killed the Conestogas “against his advice.” The pretty limestone church where he preached with a rifle beside him in the pulpit holds services every Sunday.
The Conestoga Indians themselves, as I have said, vanished. Even their bones disappeared—unearthed, reburied, and ultimately lost in Lancaster’s efforts to construct a downtown railroad line in the late nineteenth century. A few years ago, when I visited the State Museum in Harrisburg to see some of the artifacts excavated at Betty Witmer’s farm in Conestoga, a curator told me that while members of other Indian tribes often called about objects in the museum’s holdings (the day I was there a Delaware phoned), she had never received a call from anyone claiming to be either a Susquehannock or a Conestoga. It’s as if they’d never existed.
Some of the petroglyphs in the Susquehanna River were altered in the 1930s by the construction of a hydroelectric dam just upstream. Officials removed several dozen sections of inscribed rock before the dam went up, but other parts of the site were submerged. Seven boulders remain visible. Paul Nevin, the de facto curator of the petroglyphs, makes an offering of tobacco every time he visits the site. “Native Americans referred to rocks as grandfathers, because rocks contain the stories of Mother Earth,” he told me one evening as I watched him scatter copper-colored leaves onto the surface of one of the big stones. It was late October, and we had sailed out in Paul’s battered aluminum dingy. Hawks coasted overhead. At my feet I could make out dozens of shapes: thunderbirds, crosses, circles, footprints, both animal and human.
Inside the Fulton basement, actors lounge in the greenroom, trading jokes and cough drops as they wait to go onstage. They’re half-dressed—bathrobes and T-shirts over crinolines and tuxedo pants. You could be forgiven for thinking James Webb’s prison walls still house “loose and idle persons.”
If you look closely, you can see how Webb worked: tall blocks of limestone alternate with stacks of short blocks to create long rows he then plumbed with lines and bobs. He must have been proud of his craftsmanship, the thousands of stones laid end to end, edges squared, thin bands of mortar laboriously applied with a trowel. Two of his walls extend all the way up to the stage, where they’ve been painted black.
It’s a few minutes before eight. From her podium behind the proscenium, the stage manager calls places.