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.
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