Benjamin Franklin, Self-Revealed, Volume 1 (of 2): A Biographical and Critical Study Based Mainly on his own WritingsBruce, Wiliam Cabell
History
Benjamin Franklin, Self-Revealed, Volume 1 (of 2): A Biographical and Critical Study Based Mainly on his own Writings
Bruce, Wiliam Cabell
Franklin, Benjamin, 1706-1790
supplied to some extent by mendicancy and the chase, but mainly by the sale
to the whites of the brooms, baskets and wooden ladles made by the women.
The oldest of the band, a man named Shehaes, was old enough to have been
present when the original chain of friendship between the tribe and William
Penn was brightened by a second treaty between the same contracting
parties. The youngest were infants. There is good reason to believe that at
least one or two of the band had been in secret commerce with the hostile
Indians whose shocking barbarities had filled the souls of such of the
Pennsylvania borderers as had not been tomahawked, carried off into
captivity or driven from their homes with sensations little short of
frenzied desperation. On Wednesday, the 14th of December, 1763, fifty men
from the territory about Paxton, a small town in Pennsylvania, on the
Susquehanna above Conestoga, all mounted, and armed with firelocks, hangers
and hatchets, descended upon the squalid huts of this band, about dawn, and
slaughtered in cold blood three men, two women and a young boy--the only
members of the vagabond band whom they found at home. The firelocks,
hangers and hatchets were all used in perpetrating the bloody work, and the
miserable victims were scalped and horribly mangled besides. Shehaes
himself was cut to pieces in his bed. Then, after seizing upon such booty
as was to be found, and applying the torch to most of the huts, the
murderers rode away through the snow-drifts to their homes. A shudder of
horror passed through the whites in the vicinity, and a cry of bitter
lamentation went up from the younger survivors of the band when they
returned to the sickening spot, where the charred bodies of their parents
and other relations, looking as one observer said like half burnt logs,
told the hideous story.
We had known the greater part of them from children
[said Susannah Wright, a humane white woman, who
resided near the spot], had been always intimate with
them. Three or four of the women were sensible and
civilized, and the Indians' children used to play with
ours, and oblige them all they could. We had many
endearing recollections of them, and the manner of
effecting the brutal enormity so affected us, that we
had to beg visitors to forbear to speak of it.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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