A gripping account of how a vigilante mob of Pennsylvania frontiersmen butchered a Native American tribe—and got away with it. On two chilly December days in 1763, bands of armed men raged through camps of peaceful Conestoga Indians. They killed twenty Susquehannock women, children and men, effectively wiping out the tribe. These murderous rampages by Lancaster County’s Paxton Boys were the tragic culmination of a gruesomely violent conflict between European settlers and native tribes. The Paxton Boys then journeyed to Philadelphia, not to evade the law but to confront it. They openly threatened to commit more of the same violence if their demands were not met. In Massacre at the Conestogas, Lancaster journalist Jack Brubaker gives a blow-by-blow account of the massacres, examines their aftermath, and investigates how the Paxton Boys got away with murder.

Chronicles the massacre of the Conestoga tribe in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania by the Paxton Boys in 1763 and the subsequent treatment of the perpetrators and the memory of the crime.

William Penn established Pennsylvania in 1682 as a "holy experiment" in which Europeans and Indians could live together in harmony. In this book, historian Kevin Kenny explains how this Peaceable Kingdom--benevolent, Quaker, pacifist--gradually disintegrated in the eighteenth century, with disastrous consequences for Native Americans. Kenny recounts how rapacious frontier settlers, most of them of Ulster extraction, began to encroach on Indian land as squatters, while William Penn's sons cast off their father's Quaker heritage and turned instead to fraud, intimidation, and eventually violence during the French and Indian War. In 1763, a group of frontier settlers known as the Paxton Boys exterminated the last twenty Conestogas, descendants of Indians who had lived peacefully since the 1690s on land donated by William Penn near Lancaster. Invoking the principle of "right of conquest," the Paxton Boys claimed after the massacres that the Conestogas' land was rightfully theirs. They set out for Philadelphia, threatening to sack the city unless their grievances were met. A delegation led by Benjamin Franklin met them and what followed was a war of words, with Quakers doing battle against Anglican and Presbyterian champions of the Paxton Boys. The killers were never prosecuted and the Pennsylvania frontier descended into anarchy in the late 1760s, with Indians the principal victims. The new order heralded by the Conestoga massacres was consummated during the American Revolution with the destruction of the Iroquois confederacy. At the end of the Revolutionary War, the United States confiscated the lands of Britain's Indian allies, basing its claim on the principle of "right of conquest." Based on extensive research in eighteenth-century primary sources, this engaging history offers an eye-opening look at how colonists--at first, the backwoods Paxton Boys but later the U.S. government--expropriated Native American lands, ending forever the dream of colonists and Indians living together in peace.

"Intense and well-researched, . . . ambitious, . . . magisterial. . . . Surviving Genocide sets a bar from which subsequent scholarship and teaching cannot retreat."--Peter Nabokov, New York Review of Books In this book, the first part of a sweeping two-volume history, Jeffrey Ostler investigates how American democracy relied on Indian dispossession and the federally sanctioned use of force to remove or slaughter Indians in the way of U.S. expansion. He charts the losses that Indians suffered from relentless violence and upheaval and the attendant effects of disease, deprivation, and exposure. This volume centers on the eastern United States from the 1750s to the start of the Civil War. An authoritative contribution to the history of the United States' violent path toward building a continental empire, this ambitious and well-researched book deepens our understanding of the seizure of Indigenous lands, including the use of treaties to create the appearance of Native consent to dispossession. Ostler also documents the resilience of Native people, showing how they survived genocide by creating alliances, defending their towns, and rebuilding their communities.

This is the second book in the Wend Eckert/Forbes Road series. Insurrection sweeps the border settlements! Young sharpshooter and gunsmith Wend Eckert returns to the Pennsylvania border settlements from his service as a scout during Pontiac's Rebellion. He is determined to take revenge against wealthy Indian trader Richard Grenough and his henchmen---the men who were responsible for the death of his family. But Eckert finds that the Ulster-Scot settlers of Sherman Valley and Paxton are infuriated by the refusal of the pacifist government in Philadelphia to help defend the border country from rampaging war parties. In frustration, rogue militiamen from Paxton attack the the peaceful Conestoga Indians of Lancaster in the belief that they have been providing assistance to the hostiles. Wend suddenly finds himself at odds with friends and neighbors as he tries to save his former school friend, Charlie Sawak of the Conestoga tribe. Over the long winter, Wend travels the Cumberland Valley to uncover the long tentacles of Grenough's conspiracy and finds the trader helped incite the attack on the Conestogas in order to distract attention from his treasonous operations. Wend realizes that he must resort to violence to bring justice to the outlaw trader. Then, in the midst of his private war, the young man finds himself romantically entangled with a woman who is the lover of his greatest enemy. Finally, on a winding, mountainous stretch of Forbes Road, Wend Eckert and his enemies meet in a climactic battle to the finish.

An adventurous story of a frontier boy raised by Indians, The Light in the Forest is a beloved American classic. When John Cameron Butler was a child, he was captured in a raid on the Pennsylvania frontier and adopted by the great warrrior Cuyloga. Renamed True Son, he came to think of himself as fully Indian. But eleven years later his tribe, the Lenni Lenape, has signed a treaty with the white men and agreed to return their captives, including fifteen-year-old True Son. Now he must go back to the family he has forgotten, whose language is no longer his, and whose ways of dress and behavior are as strange to him as the ways of the forest are to them.