REDRAWING HISTORY
A GRAPHIC NOVEL RECOUNTS THE CONESTOGA MASSACRE FROM THE TRIBE’S PERSPECTIVE
BY JOHN F. ROSS E
verything about the Paxton Boys episode was ugly. In 1763, a mob of Scots-Irish colonists from Paxtang Township, Penn- sylvania,
vented their anger from the recent French and
Indian War on the unarmed Conestoga tribe, which was living along the Susquehanna River in the southeast corner of the state. The colo- nists massacred 20 Indian men, women and children during two separate episodes, first in the tribal village and then while the Conestoga were in the colonists’ nearby township. These violent acts wiped out an entire tribe, yet no one was held accountable. A graphic novel might seem an odd
choice to examine this disturbing chapter in American history, but Will Fenton, the direc- tor of Scholarly Innovation at The Library Company of Philadelphia, shows otherwise. Fenton’s brainchild—“Ghost River: The Fall and Rise of the Conestoga,” is a provocative depiction of the incidents from the Conestoga people’s perspective, a tale that eerily echoes difficult themes present in society today. The 60-page graphic novel with another 60 pages of back matter will be published in December. It is being distributed free to all 573 federally recognized tribes in the United States.
The publication is part of the Library Com-
pany’s two-year-long initiative, Redrawing History: Indigenous Perspectives on Colonial History, which is funded by The Pew Center for Arts & Heritage. The National Museum of the American Indian’s education staff served as an advisor on the project. The Library Company is also offering a slate of related public programs and an exhi- bition as well as archival documents and other resources offered through its online humanities project entitled Digital Paxton (
digitalpaxton.org). Fenton stumbled upon this little-known
event two years earlier while researching his early American literature dissertation. In Jan- uary 1764, after the attacks on the Conestoga, Benjamin Franklin intercepted 250 “Paxton Boys” on their way to Philadelphia to confront predominantly Quaker authorities. The French and Indian War had ended just months be- fore, yet the settlers felt these leaders had not done enough to protect frontier Scots-Irish and German farms from acts of aggression by other Indian tribes during and after the war. The mob dispersed when Franklin con- vinced them that their grievances would be investigated. A virulent battle of words later erupted, catalyzed by a pamphlet in which
The Library Company of Philadelphia’s “Ghost River” graphic novel opens with the Iroquoian-speaking Conestoga and neighboring Algonquian-speaking Lenape creation story of Turtle Island, in which the world came into being on the back of the Great Turtle’s shell.
14 AMERICAN INDIAN WINTER 2019
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