During Pontiac’s War in 1763, Scots-Irish Presbyterian settlers northwest of Lancaster, many of them squatters on Lenape and Shawnee land, faced deadly raids. Paxton’s pastor John Elder, the fighting parson who kept a rifle in his pulpit, raised about 110 rangers and asked to attack Native settlements, which Philadelphia refused. His followers cast themselves as Israelites and all Native people as Canaanites. Their target became the Conestoga, a remnant of 20 Susquehannock and Seneca people left on under 500 acres of land William Penn had guaranteed them in 1701, who lived by selling brooms and baskets. On December 14, 1763, about 50 Paxton Boys killed the six people they found at Conestoga Town and burned it.
The 14 survivors, including Will Sock, were placed in the Lancaster workhouse for protection, but on December 27 a mob led by Matthew Smith and Lazarus Stewart broke in and killed them all, as eyewitness William Henry recorded. Governor John Penn’s reward drew no informants. In February 1764 hundreds marched on Philadelphia to kill Christian Native refugees in the barracks, and Quakers took up arms in a militia Benjamin Franklin organized. Franklin met the mob at Germantown, and Pennsylvania later adopted the scalp bounty it demanded. Stewart became a hired fighter for Connecticut’s Susquehanna Company in the Pennamite-Yankee War and died at the Battle of Wyoming in 1778 after pushing Zebulon Butler to march out of Forty Fort.
- Franklin wrote that the Conestoga would have been safer among any people on earth than among the Christian white savages of Pennsylvania.
- John Elder later called the killers virtuous and respectable men.
- David Rittenhouse saw the marchers push rifle muzzles through Germantown windows and drag men by their hair.
- In 1768 a mob freed Frederick Stump from jail after he killed ten Native Americans.
- James Smith’s Black Boys blackened their faces with ash and attacked British pack trains bound for Fort Pitt.
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