The Paxton Boys and the Conestoga Massacre: December 1763
Near Intercourse, Pennsylvania
By December of seventeen sixty-three, the Conestoga people had been living alongside Penn's colony for eighty years. They were the remnant of the Susquehannock nation, once the dominant people of the central Pennsylvania region, traders and warriors whose population had been reduced by warfare and smallpox to a single small community near a creek in Lancaster County. About twenty of them remained. They had been granted a reservation tract by the colonial government in exchange for their peaceful coexistence and their role as diplomatic intermediaries.
On December fourteenth, a mob of approximately fifty armed men from the Paxton settlement, in present-day Dauphin County near Harrisburg, rode into the Conestoga village at dawn and killed six people, mostly elderly residents who had not fled.
The colonial government moved the remaining fourteen survivors into the Lancaster County workhouse for their protection. It was, by any measure, an adequate description of their situation: they needed to be protected from the people who shared their colony.
On December twenty-seventh, the Paxton mob returned. They broke down the workhouse door. They killed all fourteen remaining members of the Conestoga nation. The oldest accounts record that some of the victims had converted to Christianity and were praying when the men entered.
Governor John Penn issued proclamations calling for the arrest of the Paxton ringleaders. No one was prosecuted.
Benjamin Franklin had been watching from Philadelphia. He published a pamphlet called A Narrative of the Late Massacres in Lancaster County in January of seventeen sixty-four, one of the earliest documents in American history to argue directly that the murder of Indigenous people by a mob was a crime requiring accountability. He named what had happened clearly. He argued that the perpetrators had brought shame on the colony. He was, by the standards of his era, unusual in saying so.
No monument marks the Lancaster workhouse site. The Conestoga people have no living descendants. Pennsylvania's founding racial massacre is not in most Pennsylvania history curricula.
