Just as Patterson promised to his Native American friends, Stump and Ironcutter were thrown into the jail in Carlisle with the expectation that they would be executed for their villainous crimes. Patterson and other prominent Pennsylvania officials felt relieved that the prisoners were in custody and were hopeful that a full-scale war with Native Americans could be avoided.
There were some, however, with other plans. An armed mob from the backcountry of Cumberland County came to the rescue of Stump and Ironcutter. Linda Ries notes that information about his mob cannot be verified; they supposedly came from Shermans Valley, just over a mountain ridge to the north of Carlisle, and there may have been between fifty and eighty men. Eight months earlier, the Provincial Council in Philadelphia had singled out Shermans Valley as an area with “great Necessity for Justices of the Peace.” It seemed to many inhabitants that their neighbors could get away with breaking colonial laws and never fear a penalty.
John Armstrong wrote to Penn a few hours later, “In this Perturbation of Mind, I cannot write but in real Distress, only inform your Honour that we are deceived and disgraced at once…” Armstrong admitted that it took less than ten minutes for the frontiersmen to complete their task, in “open Triumph and Violation of the Law.” He pled his case, noting that he and other magistrates tried to hold the door against the mass of men, while a smaller number of outlaws broke into the cell by threatening the head jailer with a pistol.
The news of the breakout reached Philadelphia within days. Notices were printed in the Pennsylvania Gazette and reprinted in other papers, such as the Maryland Gazette. The notices remarked on the impotence of law enforcement in Carlisle; their “Opposition and Perswasions” [sic] fell on deaf ears.
Who were these men who so blatantly defied authority? How can we explain the actions of this “body of armed People from the Frontiers,” as General Gage described them? At this time it was actually not uncommon for bands of frontiersmen to ignore the laws of the urban legislature. In a letter about the jailbreak, Charles Lukens wrote that “there came down a Great Number of Black Boys,” and historian Alden T. Vaughn notes that frontier vigilante groups like the Paxton Boys and Black Boys were notorious for acts of defiance against the government and violence towards Native Americans. Whether these were the same white settlers who attacked supply caravans on Sideling Hill almost three years earlier is doubtful. But the Shermans Valley mob was motivated by a similar belief: that the Colony of Pennsylvania placed the contentment of Native Americans above the safety of its “back inhabitants.” Armstrong told Penn directly that the mob pushing at the jailhouse door explained itself in terms of frontier justice. They believed that no trial held in Philadelphia could be fair and that Native Americans who had killed white colonists since the formal end of Pontiac’s Rebellion in 1766 had not been brought to justice. So, with the help of this latest version of Cumberland County rebels, Stump and Ironcutter once again evaded punishment.
The historian Daniel Barr explains the actions of such “back inhabitants”:
The true importance of these events lay not so much in the details of what happened but in what these episodes revealed about how the backcountry population viewed authority. Many settlers believed that the British government and their own colonial governments did not care about them. Their opinion was not formed in reaction to oppressive government policies but, rather, grew out of the general inactivity of government in their daily lives and the perception that their elected representatives were unresponsive to backcountry concerns. In their estimation, the greatest proof of this neglect was the failure of the government to protect them from Indian attacks over the last decades. (A Colony Sprung from Hell, p. 125)