118 THE PAXTON MEN. . [1763. 



from the town of Lancaster, was a spot known as 

 the Manor of Conestoga ; w^here a small band of 

 Indians, speaking the Iroquois tongue, had been 

 seated since the first settlement of the province. 

 William Penn had visited and made a treaty with 

 them, which had been confirmed by several suc- 

 ceeding governors, so that the band had always 

 remained on terms of friendship with the English. 

 Yet, like other Indian communities in the neighbor- 

 hood of the whites, they had dwindled in numbers 

 and prosperity, until they were reduced to twenty 

 persons ; who inhabited a cluster of squalid cabins, 

 and lived by beggary and the sale of brooms, 

 baskets, and wooden ladles, made by the women. 

 The men spent a small part of their time in hunt- 

 ing, and lounged away the rest in idleness. In 

 the immediate neighborhood, they were commonly 

 regarded as harmless vagabonds ; but elsew^here a 

 more unfavorable opinion was entertained, and they 

 were looked upon as secretly abetting the enemy, 

 acting as spies, giving shelter to scalping-parties, 

 and even aiding them in their depredations. That 

 these suspicions were not wholly unfounded is 

 shown by a conclusive mass of evidence, though it 

 is probable that the treachery was confined to one 

 or two individuals.^ The exasperated frontiersmen 

 were not in a mood to discriminate, and the inno- 

 cent w^ere destined to share the fate of the guilty.^ 



1 See Appendix, E. 



2 For an account of the Conestoga Indians, see Penn. Hist. Coll 390. It 

 is extremely probable, as shown by Mr. Shea, that they were the rem- 

 nant of the formidable people called Andastes, who spoke a dialect of the 

 Iroquois, but were deadly enemies of the Iroquois proper, or Five Nations, 

 by whom they were nearly destroyed about the year 1672. 



