“Did we not brave the summer’s heat and the winter’s cold, and the savage tomahawk, while the Inhabitants of Philadelphia, Philadelphia county, Bucks, and Chester, ‘ate, drank, and were merry’?
“If a white man kill an Indian, it is a murder far exceeding any crime upon record; he must not be tried in the county where he lives, or where the offence was committed, but in Philadelphia, that he may be tried, convicted, sentenced and hung without delay. If an Indian kill a white man, it was the act of an ignorant Heathen, perhaps in liquor; alas, poor innocent! he is sent to the friendly Indians that he may be made a Christian.”
[353] And when the Lord thy God shall deliver them before thee, thou shalt smite them, and utterly destroy them; thou shalt make no covenant with them, nor show mercy unto them.”—Deuteronomy, vii. 2.
[354] So promising a theme has not escaped the notice of novelists, and it has been adopted by Dr. Bird in his spirited story of Nick of the Woods.
[355] See Appendix, E.
[356] 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 remnant 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.
[357] On one occasion, a body of Indians approached Paxton on Sunday, and sent forward one of their number, whom the English supposed to be a friend, to reconnoitre. The spy reported that every man in the church, including the preacher, had a rifle at his side; upon which the enemy withdrew, and satisfied themselves with burning a few houses in the neighborhood. The papers of Mr. Elder were submitted to the writer’s examination by his son, an aged and esteemed citizen of Harrisburg.
[358] The above account of the massacre is chiefly drawn from the narrative of Matthew Smith himself. This singular paper was published by Mr. Redmond Conyngham, of Lancaster, in the Lancaster Intelligencer for 1843. Mr. Conyngham states that he procured it from the son of Smith, for whose information it had been written. The account is partially confirmed by incidental allusions, in a letter written by another of the Paxton men, and also published by Mr. Conyngham. This gentleman employed himself with most unwearied diligence in collecting a voluminous mass of documents, comprising, perhaps, every thing that could contribute to extenuate the conduct of the Paxton men; and to these papers, as published from time to time in the above-mentioned newspaper, reference will often be made.
[359] Haz. Pa. Reg. IX. 114.
[360] Papers published by Mr. Conyngham in the Lancaster Intelligencer.