Intermittent clashes and escalating animosity demonstrate that despite the Penns’ best efforts, Pennsylvania was not an exception to recurring quarrels between colonists and the Indians upon whose lands they encroached.
The events surveyed below mark a general shift in roles from the early 1750s to the late 1760s: over time, Native Americans increasingly sought physical and legal protection from their violent colonial counterparts rather than being the aggressors, which had previously been the case. Furthermore, obtaining justice for the Native Americans who were killed in these confrontations was a goal of colonial officials, but one that was rarely achieved. Historians such as Alden Vaughn, G.S. Rowe, and James Merrell recount a pattern of violence and impotent justice that built into skepticism and simmering anger by the time that Frederick Stump committed his infamous deeds.
1755: The Penn’s Creek Massacre
As early as 1753, Native Americans had protested colonial settlements on lands west of the Susquehanna River and on July 6, 1754, the Six Nations signed a treaty in Albany saying as much. Still, colonists, including George Gabriel, began settling in this area in the same year. In mid-October 1755, a pair of murders occurred in the area of Gabriel’s house, foreshadowing the outburst known as the Penn’s Creek Massacre. Around the 16th, fourteen colonists were found dead and eleven missing. They were tomahawked, scalped, and immolated.
John Harris, an English-born trader and ferry master who lived down the Susquehanna River near present-day Harrisburg, informed officials in Philadelphia of the violence and gathered a body of forty men to ride north to investigate. Harris sensed the high stakes of the moment, telling Governor Robert Morris that “any Delay of our acting Vigorously now at this time will be the loss of all Indian Interest & perhaps our ruin in these parts.” Harris and his posse of “Neighbours” would also fall victim to violence, as they were ambushed near George Gabriel’s house on their way south from Shamokin. Ten days after the massacre, Conrad Weiser, the veteran go-between for the colony, correctly predicted a mass exodus of white settlers from the Central Susquehanna Valley. Much of the territory surrounding Penn’s Creek and Middle Creek was abandoned by Euro-Americans for the next decade.
1763: The Paxton Boys’ Massacres
At Conestoga Manor on December 14, 1763, the Paxton Boys scalped six Indians and burned their houses. The Paxton Boys were white settlers who held the decades-long frontier antagonism toward a Colonial government that seemed unable (or unwilling) to defend the backcountry against Native American raids. The Paxton Boys’ violent rampage, they explained, was peremptory—it was meant to strike a blow before a purported attack by Native Americans. But their actions belied a homicidal mob mentality. After the fourteen surviving Conestoga were placed into protective custody in nearby Lancaster, the Paxton Boys returned two weeks later and murdered them as well. They later attempted to kill 140 more Native Americans in Philadelphia the following February, but disbanded upon learning that a force 700-strong force awaited their arrival in the city.
1765: The Black Boys’ Raid
In March 1765, a group of white frontiersmen (known locally as “Black Boys“) ransacked a mercantile caravan traveling to Fort Pitt as it reached Sideling Hill, preventing it from continuing over the mountains. At the end of Pontiac’s Rebellion, the Black Boys believed they were protecting themselves from hostile Native Americans who would be armed and equipped with the captured goods. As the British Lords of Trade explained, the route from the Susquehanna to Fort Pitt had gained great significance since the Seven Years’ War, replacing the trans-New York route that had been crucial for generations. And now alienated white settlers sought to break that link.
The people whom the fur trader Robert Callender called the “rascally part of the Inhabitants of Conegocheage” blackened their faces as a disguise and destroyed sixty-three horse-loads of supplies. Governor John Penn issued a proclamation against these “sundry persons” who acted in a “most riotous and illegal manner” and ordered them to leave the main road heading west over the mountains. All residents of the colony, Penn ordered, must allow military supplies “to proceed and pass…freely and safely, without offering Violence or injury to their persons, or any Goods under their charge, or giving them the least Molestation whatsoever.”
Sir William Johnson, the Crown’s Superintendent of Indian Affairs, wrote to Penn from his headquarters in central New York in the aftermath of the Black Boys’ attack. Johnson excoriated the “Rash People” of the frontier and warned that the “Extraordinary behaviour of the back Inhabitants” could land Pennsylvania in hot water. British General Thomas Gage reported to Penn that “peace and tranquility” would return to Pennsylvania, “unless interrupted by the Rioutous and lawless proceedings of the people of the Frontiers of Pennsylvania.” Gage also worried that the Native Americans to the west, in the Ohio and Illinois countries, would be driven into the arms of French traders if supplies could not move between Philadelphia and Fort Pitt.
The intact wares were taken to Fort Loudon, where garrisoned soldiers also detained some backwoodsmen in connection with the raid. In response, the Black Boys attacked the fort and seized its commander. Commander Lieutenant Grant was carried fifteen miles into the woods and threatened with death if the weapons stored at Fort Loudon were not turned over to the Black Boys. Reid and Grant soon learned that several Cumberland County Justices of the Peace were in league with (or actually leading) the Black Boys, showing how the concept of “law and order” was a relative one in 1760s Pennsylvania. No one was ever indicted for the “Outrages Committed by the Country people”; the grand jury, Grant wryly noted in September, was “Composed of People of the Same Stamp.”
1766: The Flight of Samuel Jacobs
Two years before the Stump Massacre, almost to the very day, the Cumberland County settler Samuel Jacobs murdered and scalped a Mohawk Indian who was travelling to the Six Nations territory from Cherokee lands to the South. Cumberland County officials informed the Governor that Jacobs had fled, presumably to the frontier areas of Maryland or Virginia. A pattern that would be repeated during the Stump crisis then ensued in early 1766: Penn called on the legal authorities of the areas in which the fugitive was thought to be hiding to arrest him on sight, issued a physical description of Jacobs to aid in his capture, and wrote to Sir William Johnson to keep him abreast of yet another frontier “calamity.” Penn told his neighboring governors that they surely knew the “ill Consequences that will ensue if all necessary steps are not pursued in order to bring to Justice this lawless Villain, as well to convince the Indians of our good Intentions towards them as to deter others from the same Conduct, which, if we cannot fall upon some means of putting a stop to, we may reasonably expect to be again involved in the Miseries of another Indian War.” Eight months later, Penn had to write again, asking if anything had been done in Maryland and Virginia to find Jacobs. Fauquier answered in December 1766, admitting that he could obtain “no Intelligence” of Jacobs. “At this I am not surprized [sic],” wrote the Virginia governor, “for I have found by experience, it is impossible to bring anybody to Justice for the Murder of an Indian, who takes shelter among our back Inhabitants. It is among those People, looked on as a meritorious action, and they are sure of being Protected.”
When Johnson replied to Penn’s news about the affair, he assured Penn that he would do everything in his power to help Pennsylvania officials bring Jacobs to justice. However, Johnson was not optimistic; he had seen too many similar incidents. Johnson’s words are worth quoting in full, for they offer a frank assessment of the late-1760s atmosphere on the Pennsylvania frontier:
My apprehensions are augmented on this occasion from the reason there is to Expect that this Spirit, which has so often shewn itself of late amongst the Inhabitants, will not stop here, and that this ill-timed rage of theirs must doubtless rouse the Resentments of a People prone to Revenge, and too ready to Quarrel with us, Whereby all my endeavors to bring them to peace, and to remove their suspicions must appear calculated to amuse and deceive them, whilst their ruin is our Aim. Had this been the first or second Instance I might have pacifyed the Injured, but at present I am somewhat at a Loss how to speak to or take upon me to promise them a Redress, of which, thro’ the Arts or Secrecy of the Inhabitants they may be disappointed as some of these people appear to set every power at defiance.
The three years before the Stump Massacre were a nasty time on the frontier. A report from Carlisle told of a posse of white settlers heading to Shamokin to kill any Native American they could find. A report from the garrison at Fort Augusta described “a Number of White People” from Cumberland County moving northward and inquiring about the location of Native Americans. A letter from Winchester, Virginia, observed that Virginians and Marylanders were flocking over the Allegheny Mountains—and that two particular settlers were quick to flaunt two Indian scalps that they’d taken near Fort Pitt. A dispatch from Fort Loudon mentioned the murder of nine Native Americans in northwestern Virginia. The news suggested that even though peace had been established once more between the colonies and Native groups, the tensions between would continue. When John Penn complained to the Justices of Cumberland County of the “turbulent and unruly Spirit” that pervaded their region, he could have been speaking for the entire backcountry.