Читать книгу Staging Ground - Leslie Stainton - Страница 15
ОглавлениеTHE KILLING OF THE CONESTOGAS: 1763
Black braids frame her face. She wears a colorful headband with an even more colorful feather, a brown dress, a choker strung with plump red beads. I was seven when I sketched her, in crayon, for the frontispiece of “My Indian Book,” an illustrated collection of one-sentence stories about Native Americans who pray for rain, sing songs, build birch-bark canoes, and await the end of “hungry time.” I was infatuated with Pocahontas and almost certainly had her in mind as I drew. Perhaps I imagined this young woman and I had been sisters in some prelapsarian world. More than forty years later her startled eyes look straight into mine, and she smiles as if to say, It’s all right, you may have my land. My bed. My home. My food. I understand.
On the booklet’s orange cover I drew what I took to be Indian symbols: a cloud fringed with lines of rain, a geometrical tree. Decades later I learned that shapes much like these are etched in giant schist rocks in the middle of the Susquehanna River at the southern end of Lancaster County, where I grew up. The carvings are perhaps a thousand years old and still visible, though you need a boat to get there, and the short voyage is not without its hazards. It takes muscle to get a purchase on a thigh-high ledge halfway up Big Indian Rock, then hoist yourself to the top of the huge boulder, whose surface is scarred with petroglyphs.
Perhaps you are wondering what this has to do with Yecker’s Fulton Hall. There is, I believe, a connection, and it has to do with stone.
On the ground floor of the Fulton Theatre, around the corner from the lobby and just outside the women’s room, a smooth interior wall parts to reveal a portion of a second wall, made of limestone, which dates back to the eighteenth century and belonged to the city jail. Downstairs in the theater’s labyrinthine basement, further portions of the old jail wall wind through the greenroom, the dressing rooms, the bathrooms and ushers’ quarters, under the stage and beside the file cabinets that hold financial and other records. When masons first coaxed these chunks of stone from the earth almost three centuries ago and hauled them here to build a prison, the town of Lancaster barely existed (it would not become a city until 1818). A pair of streets, King and Queen, met in a square that held a courthouse and market; a log cabin served as a Catholic chapel, and a stone building with a spire as a Lutheran one. There were a hundred or so private homes, most of them wood. Along the western wall of the new stone jail, a stream rumbled on its way to the Conestoga River, which fed into the Susquehanna, some ten miles distant, whose waters gave rise to mammoth rocks inscribed with sacred messages.
Pushing south from its crop of Indian petroglyphs, the Susquehanna empties into the Chesapeake Bay, mapped by the English Captain John Smith, of Pocahontas fame, in the early 1600s. Smith pronounced the area a revelation and called the Indians whom he met at the mouth of the river “Susquehannocks.” They seemed to him giants, with calves that measured three-quarters of a yard around, though twentieth-century archaeologists would conclude that the average Susquehannock male stood just under 5'4". Of the Indians’ language, which he did not understand, Smith wrote, “It may well beseeme their proportions, sounding as a voyce in a vault.” The Susquehannocks wore animal skins and carried gifts, including swords and tobacco pipes. At their first encounter, they raised their hands to the sun, broke into song, and embraced Smith, who tried to push them away. They laid objects at his feet, and around his shoulders they placed a painted bear hide as well as other skins and a necklace of heavy white beads. They begged him to protect them from rival tribes.
Smith published his Map of Virginia in 1612, and for the next sixty years this document was the primary means by which British explorers understood the Chesapeake and its precolonial inhabitants. Among the Indians Smith identified was a group called the Conestogas. These too were Susquehannock people, whom French fur traders had labeled “Andastes” or “Gandastogues.” They lived east of the Susquehanna River, many in and around what would become Lancaster County, and their footpaths crisscrossed the land. Smith and his compatriots anglicized their name and eventually used it to denote the places where these Indians dwelt.
I grew up in a suburban neighborhood in eastern Lancaster County, a few hundred yards from Stauffer’s Run, a tributary of the Conestoga River and by extension the Susquehanna. Without realizing it, I was treading on Indian ground whenever I went outdoors to play. I was intrigued by arrowheads, to be sure, and envied the few people I knew who’d found one. By rights I should have been among them; our neighborhood was under constant construction while I was growing up, with pits of earth ripe for excavation, but I wasn’t interested. By the time I graduated from high school, the field across the street from my parents’ house had become a grid of manicured lawns, two with swimming pools and one with its own tennis court. The Conestoga River meandered along a golf course on the far side of the neighborhood, and I often crossed it on a footbridge on my way to the country club to go swimming. I knew nothing about the origins of the word “Conestoga,” except that it had lent itself to my high school, Conestoga Valley, and a century before that to the huge red, white, and blue wagons that helped settle the American West. Other than “My Indian Book,” I don’t recall learning much of anything about Native Americans in school. History began with the Pilgrims, and I sketched them over and over again, cheerful faces in funny hats and stiff white collars. But at some point it catches up with you. Fall in love with a building, and the next thing you know, you’re wondering what happened to the Indians.
The simple answer is: they vanished. The Conestogas who inhabited my county clung to the hope of peaceful coexistence with their European neighbors for more than a hundred years and signed treaty after treaty, several in the brick courthouse on Lancaster’s main square. They met with William Penn, who pledged that the two groups “should always live as friends and brothers, and be as one body,” but his heirs betrayed Penn’s vision and continued to surge west, seizing Indian land as they went.
By 1745, when colonists in Lancaster began erecting a two-story limestone prison at the intersection of King and Prince Streets, one block west of the courthouse, European settlers had crossed the Susquehanna and were heading into the Alleghenies. The few Conestogas left in Lancaster County had taken up residence, along with the remnants of a half dozen other displaced and dying tribes, in a four-hundred-acre tract of land south of the city, known as Conestoga Town. Provincial officials authorized the area for use by the Conestogas—as the Indians who lived there were collectively known—“so long as they obeyed all the English conditions set forth therein.” Here, on this hilly spot a dozen miles from downtown Lancaster, the stories of the Fulton Theatre and the Conestoga Indians converge.
In my own lifetime the acreage where the Indians lived would metamorphose into a scraggly farm owned by a widow in her eighties named Betty Witmer, who for a while served as the local trash collector and dogcatcher. In 1972, a team of archaeologists cleared the topsoil from a thirty-two-thousand-square-foot piece of land on her property and found a half dozen storage pits, three houses, and five small cemeteries crammed with funerary objects, which they took to the state museum in Harrisburg for safekeeping. A couple of years ago, I met up with a neighbor of Betty’s who collects Indian artifacts, and with Betty’s blessing he and I spent a muggy June afternoon walking up and down one of her fields. I came away with a fragment of clay pipe, less than an inch long and plugged with soil, which now sits beside my computer in a little ceramic bowl where I’ve also placed three pieces of stone from the Fulton basement. I often finger and sometimes smell them, and from time to time I touch my tongue to each in the hope of recovering something, I’m not sure what. The pipe tastes of chalk, the stones vaguely of salt.
Shorn of the wilderness that had previously sustained them, the Indians of Conestoga Town spent their last decades peddling baskets and brooms to the European immigrants whose farms surrounded their bleak reservation. No longer the noble Susquehannocks of Smith’s day, nor even the buckskin-clad braves and squaws of “My Indian Book,” they subsisted mostly on corn. It was not unusual to see them wandering the countryside in rags or begging alms in downtown Lancaster. In 1750, the Conestogas petitioned the governor of Pennsylvania to let them relocate. “Many of our old people are dead, so that we are now left as it were orphans in a destitute condition, which inclines us to leave our old habitations,” they said. But nothing came of it.
Reading about the Conestogas, I’m not always sure what or whom to trust. Eighteenth-century provincial records chart a growing fissure between colonists and their Indian neighbors, but eyewitness reports are scarce; nineteenth- and twentieth-century historians shaped the story to suit their needs; the Indians themselves left no written account. But several thousand objects taken from Betty Witmer’s farm and now in the basement of the State Museum of Pennsylvania—among them coins, bottles, tools, combs, slivers of mirror, gun parts, spectacles, and a dozen crosses, at least one with a figure of Christ—suggest the extent to which the Conestogas relied on Europeans for their everyday needs.
The outbreak of the Seven Years’ War in 1754 set off a wave of violence across Pennsylvania. With the encouragement of their French allies, natives in the western part of the province attacked settlers and missionaries to the east. Colonists in Lancaster heard story after story of Indian atrocities: a woman stabbed to death while breastfeeding, a corpse with two tomahawks sunk into its skull, natives who drank the blood of children “like water.” Not far from Lancaster, four settlers were found scalped and butchered. There were rumors that “a great body” of Indians planned to launch a flotilla of canoes on the Susquehanna and invade Lancaster County. Locals talked of erecting a stockade. Vigilante groups sprang up throughout Pennsylvania province, spurred in part by a government offer of $130 bounty a head for Indian scalps. Forty miles northwest of Lancaster, near Harrisburg, members of a Presbyterian church in the frontier town of Paxton formed a posse of armed rangers under the leadership of a militant clergyman named John Elder.
At a treaty session in Lancaster in 1756, an elderly Conestoga told colonial authorities, “We have heard a great noise all about us and expected we should have been killed.” He pleaded for protection.
Fewer than fifty Conestogas remained. They were penniless and starving, but even so they inspired fear. Rumors spread that a young Conestoga named Will Sock was in cahoots with the French and had “murder in his heart.” “In the immediate neighborhood, they were commonly regarded as harmless vagabonds,” Francis Parkman would write of the Conestogas in his 1855 history of these events. “But elsewhere, 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.” Aware they were in danger, the Conestogas stopped traveling long distances to sell their goods.
The Seven Years’ War ended officially in 1763 with the Peace of Paris and subsequent consolidation of British control over North America, but relations between natives and colonists continued to deteriorate. The new British administration nullified previous treaties between Indians and the French, canceled long-standing rites, banned gift giving, halted the sale of liquor and weapons, and restricted trade. Natives across the Northeast retaliated. Led by a visionary Ottawa named Pontiac, who vowed to drive the English “into the sea,” they attacked forts, cut communication lines, and terrorized colonists. By the summer of 1763, Pontiac’s War had claimed more than a hundred British lives. The citizens of Lancaster, as elsewhere, feared “the extermination of us all,” as Lancaster County magistrate Edward Shippen put it.
That September, nearly four dozen white settlers were murdered in eastern Pennsylvania. Paxton’s John Elder implored the governor, John Penn, grandson of William, to remove the Conestogas from Lancaster and replace their log huts with a garrison. Penn replied that the Indians of Conestoga were “innocent, helpless, and dependent upon the Governor for support,” and he could not remove them “without adequate cause.” In October, Elder’s rangers found the mutilated corpses of nine colonists along the upper Susquehanna River, and Elder again called for the area to be cleared of Indians.
Just over twenty Conestogas were left. They included an old man named Sheehays, whose father was said to have negotiated with William Penn. In late November, the Conestogas sent John Penn a letter reminding him of the friendship they had enjoyed with his grandfather and again seeking help: “As we have always lived in Peace and Quietness with our Brethren and Neighbours round us during the last and present Indian Wars, we hope now, as we are deprived from supporting our families by hunting, as we formerly did, you will consider our distressed situation, and grant our women and children some cloathing to cover them this winter.” The letter reached Penn on December 19, five days too late.
Elder’s rangers struck at dawn on Wednesday, December 14, 1763. Armed with hatchets, swords, and flintlocks, between fifty and sixty of them rode through the countryside from Paxton to reach Conestoga Town by daybreak. Deep snow covered the sleeping Indian village, and more snow was falling. Only seven Conestogas were home that morning; the rest had left to peddle wares to farmers in the neighborhood. The Paxton men broke into the Indian cabins and murdered six of the Conestogas—a seventh escaped—then plundered the threadbare village and burned what was left of it to the ground.
The ratio of killer to victim was nearly ten to one, and the butchery must have been extreme. Benjamin Franklin, who was miles away in Philadelphia at the time of the massacre but later decried it, claimed the Paxton “boys” scalped and “otherwise horribly mangled” their victims. The killers rode off in the snow with their bloody weapons, and no one stopped them. When local officials arrived on the scene, they found a smoking ruin strewn with charred corpses. One of the dead was Sheehays, who had so trusted the descendants of William Penn that he once declared, “The English will wrap me in their Matchcoat and secure me from all Danger.” Also dead was his son, Ess-canesh.
As they winnowed the debris at Conestoga, officials reportedly found a bag containing two wampum belts and several documents, one of them Penn’s original treaty with the Conestogas. Drafted and signed in Philadelphia in 1701, it promised unending “Friendship and Amity as one People.” Like so much else, this document too would disappear.
Nine miles away from the Indian village, in the borough of Columbia, the children of Quaker sheriff Robert Barber Jr. learned of the killings and were heartstricken. Barber’s children had often played with the children of the Conestogas and were so attached to one Indian boy they thought of him as a brother. Seventy years later, Barber’s adult children were still unable to talk about the event.
Fourteen Conestogas survived the slaughter in their village. Officials promptly rounded them up, took them to Lancaster, and locked them inside the city’s workhouse for their protection. Eight of the jailed were children; six were married adults.
To build a limestone wall in the eighteenth century, you first had to bore holes into a stretch of bedrock, then insert iron wedges into those holes and gently drive them deeper into the earth’s surface, and finally, with the sharp edge of a sledgehammer, “strike hard on the rock in the line between every wedge,” as a Pennsylvania stonecutter described the process, until the limestone cracked and eventually opened, like a fruit. In this manner quarriers worked their way down the crust of the earth, axes and hammers ringing. They used iron levers and bars, and sometimes sledges or stoneboats, to haul massive chunks of rock up ramps that led to the top of the quarry, where masons waited with chisels. Once hewn into rough blocks, these souvenirs of geologic time were carted off to construction sites in nascent American cities, laid side by side in long rows, one on top of the next, and secured with lime-sand mortar, the recipe for which dated back to Vitruvius.
In 1745, the commissioners of the newly incorporated town of Lancaster, Pennsylvania, had hired a mason named James Webb to construct a series of such walls on a half acre of land bounded by King, Prince, and Water Streets. The property had been given to Lancaster by the town’s founder, Andrew Hamilton, a Philadelphia lawyer and the eventual designer of Independence Hall, for the purpose of erecting a jail to house “felons, vagrants, and loose and idle persons.” A log prison had stood on the site for fifteen years, but the people of Lancaster wanted something stronger, so Webb went to work. By 1746, he and his fellow laborers had completed a stone jail; some years later the building was expanded to include an adjoining workhouse. It was to this compound the fourteen Conestogas were brought on December 14, 1763.
I don’t know when I first learned about the connection between the Conestoga Indians and the Fulton Theatre. I remember seeing a movie version of The Mikado at the Fulton in elementary school, when the theater was a rundown firetrap. Maybe I learned about the Indians then. By the time I went to work in the Fulton a decade later, I knew. Sitting in the greenroom, surrounded by stone, stories swirled: Do you know what happened here? Can you feel it? The place has a chill, and it’s not just the thermostat setting. Spend time in this room, as actors inevitably do, and you get sucked into the saga. Hear that noise? It’s the rumble of wagon wheels on the dirt road outside the prison, it’s the clang of the jailer’s keys.
Authorities claimed they were incarcerating the Indians for their safety, but it’s equally clear they were protecting themselves. The county magistrate, Edward Shippen, reasoned that had it not been snowing on the day Elder’s rangers raided Conestoga, the Indians who survived the attack might well have embarked on a murderous rampage against their white neighbors. Shippen had long feared tensions with the Indians would lead to a civil war. A businessman and slave owner with a predilection for Renaissance literature and religious texts, he had briefly been an Indian trader and harbored his share of bigotry. Shippen and other Lancastrians urged provincial officials to remove the fourteen Conestogas from Lancaster and confine them on an island outside Philadelphia, where more than a hundred displaced Delaware were already being housed. Even the Conestogas begged to be taken to Philadelphia. But they stayed in Lancaster.
Outside the prison complex, colonists in their wood and brick houses were preparing to celebrate Christmas. Inside, the Indians were alone except for a jailer who fed them and built them fires. It’s not hard to imagine their plight: cold, helpless, deprived of “necessaries and apparel,” in mourning for their murdered companions and afraid of what lay ahead. I’d like to think some charitable citizen came around to the jail with a gift of food or apparel, or remembered the Indians in his prayers, but there’s no record of it.
On December 19, Governor John Penn ordered the capture and arrest of the men who had attacked Conestoga Town, but before his proclamation could be published Elder’s men attacked again. Edward Shippen was attending services in the sanctuary of Saint James Episcopal Church in downtown Lancaster on Tuesday afternoon, December 27, when the doors to the building burst open, and he heard shouts outside: “Paxton boys!” “Murder!” “The prison is attacked!” “They are murdering the Indians!” Shippen had been warned a few nights before that a “parcel of Rioters” from Paxton was in the area, and he had dispatched a pair of constables to investigate. (The jailer had been sufficiently worried that he’d armed himself and sent his children away from the prison.) But Shippen’s men reported no signs of trouble.
Now the magistrate hurried to the workhouse. It was only a few blocks away, but by the time Shippen got there, the attackers had escaped and all fourteen Conestogas were dead. The killings had taken less than fifteen minutes. On their way out of town, the fifty to sixty men who’d carried out the assault rode around the Lancaster courthouse on horseback, “hooping and hallowing” and firing their guns into the air.
Roused by the commotion, Lancastrians streamed to the prison complex. Inside, they found what Shippen, invoking the Renaissance language he loved, termed a “Tragical scene.” Beside one door lay the bodies of Will Sock and his wife, and on top of them the corpses of two children no older than three, whose heads had been split open and scalps peeled off. Another Indian was sprawled against the west wall of the workhouse. He had been shot in the chest, his legs sliced and hands amputated, and a rifle discharged in his mouth. “His head was blown to atoms, and the brains were splashed against, and yet hanging to the wall, for three or four feet around,” said a shopkeeper’s son who raced to the scene. “In this manner lay the whole of them, men, women and children, spread about the prison yard: shot, scalped, hacked and cut to pieces.” In minutes, the Paxton frontiersmen had slaughtered the last collective body of indigenous people to inhabit Lancaster County while the land was still a wilderness.
Residents carried the Indian corpses from the workhouse into the street and eventually buried them in a Mennonite cemetery a few blocks from the workhouse. Days later, jailer Felix Donnally submitted a bill to the county for his services feeding and maintaining the Indians from the 14th to the 27th of December, and for the “Trouble and Expense of having the said Fourteen Indians carried to the grave and interred.”
“My Indian Book” does not relate this part of the story. The booklet ends with a vision of bluebirds singing and a sun god painting the sky “beautiful shades of red and gold.” I suppose that’s what I was taught. The history of Indians in America was one of high drama and some suffering, but in the end things worked out the way they were supposed to. This was ten years before the founding of the American Indian Movement and the occupation of Wounded Knee, some twenty years before the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act, and forty years before the opening of the National American Indian Museum in Washington, D.C. Although my stepchildren would learn about the Paxton killings in their eleventh-grade American history class in Ann Arbor, Michigan, I was not taught that the history of aboriginal extermination on this continent had its origins in my hometown, much less in a building on which I would come to pin my adolescent hopes.
In the aftermath of the murders, Edward Shippen went to vast lengths to absolve himself and his fellow magistrates of blame. Paxton’s John Elder did the same. In a letter to John Penn, Elder insisted he’d tried to prevent both attacks on the Conestogas. “I expostulated, but life and reason were set at defiance, and yet the men in private life are virtuous, and respectable; not cruel, but mild and merciful.” He accused others of having mutilated the Conestogas’ bodies in order to blacken the image of the Paxton rangers. Penn ordered Elder to suppress further insurrections, and he stripped the minister of his office as a colonel in the provincial military. The governor commanded Shippen to get the names of the Paxton ringleaders, and he issued a proclamation, with a bounty, calling for the killers’ immediate apprehension. No arrests were ever made.
A reconstituted Paxton gang set out in late January 1764 to attack the Delaware under Penn’s protection in Philadelphia. The rangers were stopped just outside the capital by Benjamin Franklin, among others, who arrived with five hundred armed men and a delegation of provincial officials and clergymen. Leaders of the two sides met in a tavern to hammer out a settlement, and the Paxton men backed down. It scarcely mattered: smallpox soon ravaged the barracks where the Delaware were held, and fifty-six Indians died.
The slaughter in Lancaster deepened tensions between Quaker authorities in Philadelphia and their non-Quaker constituents—many of them Scots-Irish Presbyterians—on the Pennsylvania frontier. It also gave rise to a pamphlet war. Franklin weighed in with A Narrative of the Late Massacres in Lancaster County, in which he argued that just because some Indians had murdered some settlers, other settlers had no right to avenge those deaths by killing blameless Indians. The Philadelphia printer and essayist had visited Lancaster County on several occasions and was familiar with the Conestogas. He could imagine the scene in the workhouse: “When the poor Wretches saw they had no Protection nigh, nor could possibly escape, and being without the least Weapon for Defence, they divided into their little Families, the Children clinging to the Parents; they fell on their Knees, protested their Innocence, declared their Love to the English, and that, in their whole Lives, they had never done them Injury; and in this Posture they all received the Hatchet!” No civilized nation in Europe would commit such an atrocity, Franklin observed. “Do we come to America to learn and practise the Manners of Barbarians?”
During the next months, upwards of sixty pamphlets and squibs for and against the so-called Paxton rebellion were printed and distributed, or read aloud, in taverns and coffeehouses throughout Philadelphia and as far west as Lancaster—a quantity sufficient to move Philadelphia ahead of Boston as the colony’s top publisher. Several pamphlets took the form of dialogues—primitive American theater. It’s as if the ground where the Conestogas died was fated to become sacral space. A friend who works at the Fulton remarked by e-mail when I told him about the dialogues, “It almost makes the building of a theater on the site of the massacre a touch of destiny and a haunting sort of justice.”
ANDREW TRUEMAN: Whar ha’ you been aw this Time, Tom?
THOMAS ZEALOT: Whar I have been! Whar you should ha’ been too, Andrew, fechting the Lord’s Battles, and killing the Indians at Lancaster and Cannestogoe.
TRUEMAN: How mony did you kill at Cannestogoe.
ZEALOT: Ane and Twunty.
TRUEMAN: Hoot Man, there were but twunty awthegether, and fourteen of them were in the Gaol.
ZEALOT: I tell you, we shot six and a wee ane, that was in the Squaw’s Belly; we sculped three; we tomhawked three; we roasted three and a wee ane; and three and a wee ane we gave to the Hogs; and is not that ane and twunty you Fool.
On the sixth and seventh pages of this slender tract, entitled A Dialogue Between Andrew Trueman and Thomas Zealot, About the Killing of the Indians at Cannestogoe and Lancaster, the pious Trueman speaks for those, like Franklin, who denounced the workhouse carnage: “I am afraid all this is wrong. I am a Presbyterian, you know, as well as yourself. But I wold fain hope that I am a Christian also.”
Every theater has its ghosts, and every performance raises the specter of past performances, but the Fulton strikes me as uniquely haunted. A plaque marking the scene of the Paxton massacre hangs outside the theater, on Water Street. For several years a second plaque hung inside the Fulton greenroom on one of the stone walls James Webb built. It read in part, “They were not guilty of any crime other than being at this place during that turbulent time.” Eventually the plaque was moved upstairs to the theater’s administrative offices, so now you have to go to the third floor of the building to see it, but people do. We’re drawn to the sites of savagery—Gettysburg, Little Big Horn, Ground Zero—even though we’re sometimes disappointed by the banality of what we find there. Life, as they say, goes on.
In its own day, the Lancaster workhouse and jail became a tourist attraction. One year after the Paxton killings, the British astronomer and surveyor Charles Mason visited the massacre site. “What brought me here was my curiosity to see the place where was perpetrated last Winter the Horrid and inhuman murder of 26 Indians, Men, Women and Children, leaving none alive to tell,” he wrote in his journal. The inaccuracy of Mason’s numbers suggests the extent to which the facts of the case had already begun to morph into myth. Mason went on: “What was laid to the Indians charge was that they held a private correspondence with the Enemy Indians; but this could never be proved against the men, and the women and children (some in their Mothers wombs that never saw light) could not be guilty.”
Mason seems to have spent just a day in Lancaster, and it’s unclear whether his fellow surveyor, Jeremiah Dixon, went with him. Thomas Pynchon speculates that he did, and that at the murder site Dixon felt like a “nun before a Shrine.” Both Dixon and Mason had witnessed barbarity before—public executions, whippings, torture—but the Lancaster jail was somehow different, maybe because it signified a fundamental betrayal of the idea of America. “Is it something in this Wilderness, something ancient, that waited for them, and infected their Souls when they came?” Pynchon has Dixon ask.
Pynchon imagines the streets and corners around the jail brimming with activity during Mason’s visit: guides hawking tours; tourists with sketchbooks, easels, and specimen bags eager to document the crime scene, all drawn by “the same queer Magnetism.” By this account, the Lancaster workhouse was already on its way to becoming theater.
Mason jotted down his notes and went on his way plotting the line that would separate Pennsylvania from Maryland and eventually cleave a nation into North and South. Weeks after he visited Lancaster, five Cherokee were murdered as they slept in a barn in Virginia. Mason may have heard about these and subsequent killings in Detroit, Fort Pitt, New York, and Ohio. By the time he and Dixon finished charting their line in 1767, dozens of natives had been murdered and countless more were fleeing west. The two surveyors may have wondered what their boundary defined.
No one from the Paxton gang was ever punished for the murders of the Conestogas. John Elder retained his job as a Presbyterian minister until his death in 1792 and is today lionized on websites as the “fighting pastor of Paxton,” whose battle-ready parishioners killed the Conestogas “against his advice.” The pretty limestone church where he preached with a rifle beside him in the pulpit holds services every Sunday.
The Conestoga Indians themselves, as I have said, vanished. Even their bones disappeared—unearthed, reburied, and ultimately lost in Lancaster’s efforts to construct a downtown railroad line in the late nineteenth century. A few years ago, when I visited the State Museum in Harrisburg to see some of the artifacts excavated at Betty Witmer’s farm in Conestoga, a curator told me that while members of other Indian tribes often called about objects in the museum’s holdings (the day I was there a Delaware phoned), she had never received a call from anyone claiming to be either a Susquehannock or a Conestoga. It’s as if they’d never existed.
Some of the petroglyphs in the Susquehanna River were altered in the 1930s by the construction of a hydroelectric dam just upstream. Officials removed several dozen sections of inscribed rock before the dam went up, but other parts of the site were submerged. Seven boulders remain visible. Paul Nevin, the de facto curator of the petroglyphs, makes an offering of tobacco every time he visits the site. “Native Americans referred to rocks as grandfathers, because rocks contain the stories of Mother Earth,” he told me one evening as I watched him scatter copper-colored leaves onto the surface of one of the big stones. It was late October, and we had sailed out in Paul’s battered aluminum dingy. Hawks coasted overhead. At my feet I could make out dozens of shapes: thunderbirds, crosses, circles, footprints, both animal and human.
Inside the Fulton basement, actors lounge in the greenroom, trading jokes and cough drops as they wait to go onstage. They’re half-dressed—bathrobes and T-shirts over crinolines and tuxedo pants. You could be forgiven for thinking James Webb’s prison walls still house “loose and idle persons.”
If you look closely, you can see how Webb worked: tall blocks of limestone alternate with stacks of short blocks to create long rows he then plumbed with lines and bobs. He must have been proud of his craftsmanship, the thousands of stones laid end to end, edges squared, thin bands of mortar laboriously applied with a trowel. Two of his walls extend all the way up to the stage, where they’ve been painted black.
It’s a few minutes before eight. From her podium behind the proscenium, the stage manager calls places. Actors drift onto the set. They stretch and pirouette. Some check props. A soprano, warming up, utters kittenish yelps. “Standby lights one,” the stage manager whispers into her headset. For an instant everything is suspended—actors, orchestra, audience, the redheaded boy, still as a statue, whose gloved hands grip the rope that controls the curtain that shelters this make-believe world. I watch his face. Very possibly he’s the same age James Webb was when he went to work on the building whose walls gave rise to this theater. The boy listens for his cue. He’s dressed in a flannel shirt and jeans, work boots, the kind of practical attire I imagine Webb wore. This young man too is about to unleash a story. In another moment he’ll swing into action, the Fulton’s red curtain will lift toward the heavens (or more accurately, toward a wood grid reinforced with steel), and Webb’s walls will slip into shadow, or at least it will seem that way for a while.
