While the details of Stump’s flight are uncertain, the far-reaching consequences of his actions are not.
Though Stump’s Massacre was an isolated event, its outcome was consistent with other cases throughout the colonies: Natives were murdered by a settler, who was then arrested and charged with murder but later freed. In rare instances convictions did occur, but many murderers were never even tried, let alone found guilty of their crimes. In the late summer, Governor Penn was forced to hear from the Secretary of State for the Colonies that the King “lament[ed] the ill success of your Endeavours to bring to Justice the Perpetrators of the inhuman Massacre of the Indians on the Frontier.”
Colonials citizens’ disregard of Native American lives combined with previous soured relationships and deals, such as the Walking Purchase of 1737, to increase the tension between the two sides. Native Americans began to feel more and more slighted. These transgressions undermined the original efforts of the Penn family to establish and maintain peaceful ties with their native brethren and often meant that the colonial Pennsylvania frontier, including the area that is now Snyder County, was a hotbed for intercultural conflict. General Thomas Gage warned Lord Shelburne that the Crown needed to loosen its purse-strings. “In this uncertainty,” he wrote, the British Army had to secure both Fort Pitt and Niagara, bracing for attacks. Both forts were “much decayed,” and Fort Pitt, in particular, needed to be resupplied with food so that a provocative military action would not have to be taken in the future to replenish its stores.