But the Assembly faced a dilemma. The Frame of 1701 did not outline a process for expanding its membership. With the addition of a new county in 1729, the Assembly had to determine how many members the new unit would send. Rather than grant them the same eight members that the original and more populous counties sent, the Assembly granted the county half of that. The reasons for this decision are not entirely clear, although there are a number of possible explanations. The Assembly was protective of its authority and membership, and the representatives from Lancaster could upset the status quo. Moreover, Lancaster County was needed because its residents appeared unruly, and so the Assembly may have been concerned that these people’s representatives would prove similarly destabilizing. Finally, there were far fewer colonists than in the original counties, which made some sort of proportional allocation sensible.
The success of this expanded arm of the colonial government became apparent soon after its establishment. At about the same time the county was created, Captain Civility, the chief of the Conestogas, alerted the governor to an illegal settlement by Edward Parnel “and several other familys who were settled on the west side of the [Susquehanna] river.” Pennsylvania officials with stronger tools at their disposal acted just as decisively in honoring their treaty promises as they had in prosecuting the Winter brothers. Gordon vacated Parnel’s group “by Governor’s Order” and used the levers of the law to make sure his decree was enforced, sending out officials from Lancaster to torch their buildings. Officials also promised Civility that “no person should settle on that side of the river without our consent.” As one nineteenth-century historian remarked with surprise, “It is difficult to believe that as late as 1731 what was called an official map was published fixing the river Susquehanna as the extreme and western boundary of the province of Pennsylvania.” The Conestogas were not the only Natives who expressed concern with expanding settlements. The Shawnees also expressed displeasure with the new western settlements. To help allay such discontent, the government moved to “dispossess all persons settled on that side of the [Susquehanna] river” so “that those woods may remain free to the Indians.” Gordon used the offices of the new county to implement these orders and, in the process, helped restrain colonial settlement, while also reinforcing the centrality of proprietary authority.46
While the county proved effective in curtailing unlawful expansion, in 1730, the institution faced a test reminiscent of the Winters’ murders. In the heat of late August 1730, word came to Joshua Lowe, the coroner for Lancaster County, that colonists had discovered three badly decomposed bodies near a small creek. Evidence suggested murder. Lowe went out to inspect. Though the bodies were hard to identify, he could tell that the dead were Indians who had had their skulls crushed. Lowe also knew that if colonists had killed these three people, then the tensions between Native and colonial society created by such an act could easily rekindle the fears of 1728.
Lowe decided to follow the terms of the alliance that Gordon outlined in his treaty speech. He alerted the Conestoga and Conoy Indians, the two groups who lived in the area, to the discovery and asked for help in investigating. They accepted. Lowe then convened a formal inquisition composed of colonists and Indians, a move that harkened back to Penn’s original vision of joint juries working together to maintain peace and cultivate mutual understanding. The jury quickly decided death by murder but concluded that the bodies were too far decomposed to say more than that. More important, they all agreed that Pennsylvanians bore no blame for the deaths.47
Lowe knew there was more to this story, though he did not let his knowledge interfere with the official inquest. In a private letter to Gordon, he said that the dead Indians were likely a Delaware family and that the murderer was suspected to be the jealous husband of one of the Indian women. Lowe noted that since the crime involved an Indian killing another Indian, the colonial government had no responsibility to act. Lowe’s statement shows that the understanding of Indians’ legal status in the colony that had developed over time and through precedent had made its way down to the most local of officials. Through actions like Lowe’s, officials stationed far away from colonial capitals and even farther from the imperial center in England began to expand and assert colonial authority over new ground. While diplomats and political leaders could negotiate treaties, it was here, in areas of new settlement, that the colony was being created through the actions of local officials like Lowe who were implementing and enforcing policies and, in the process, establishing a functional government.48
After the handling of the murders in 1730, Pennsylvania’s relations with Indians stood on solid ground. Later that year, Captain Civility hinted at the successful settlement of the 1728 crisis in a letter he sent to Gordon. He noted that the Conestogas had followed the spirit of Gordon’s 1728 speech—that “wee should not hurt any of your people”—and he thanked Gordon for doing the same by removing the squatters. But Civility’s letter also contained a worrisome subtext. Pennsylvanians—including some of the county officials who had promised Civility that they would stop encroachments—continued to secretly survey lands on the west side of the Susquehanna. New settlers from Maryland also began to appear, claiming that the land was their property and not Pennsylvania’s. The reemergence of this colonial rivalry in the wake of the frontier crisis of 1728 posed novel challenges to Pennsylvania’s colonial government as it tried to maintain an ordered and peaceful expansion while also trying to fend off an aggressive neighbor.49
CHAPTER 4
Pennsylvania’s Apogee
In the 1730s, as British colonies in North America continued to grow, the Pennsylvania government faced a new test. Maryland began establishing its own claims to land the Penns expected would one day be their own. The dispute over the proper boundaries of Maryland and Pennsylvania had simmered since William Penn received his charter, but only in the 1730s did the rivalry turn into a war, as settlements pushed colonial boundaries closer together and forced the issue to the fore. From about 1732 to 1738, Maryland and Pennsylvania engaged in a protracted border war marked by low-level strife punctuated by moments of extreme violence. Although the idea of a war between colonies seems odd, perhaps even an overstatement, everyone at the time called it one. When the Conojocular War, as it was called at the time, or Cresap’s War, as most recent historians have called it, was over, Pennsylvania had secured its border and vanquished its colonial rival.
The conflict is little studied and underappreciated; yet the episode is essential to understanding the colony’s political development and geographic growth. It forced Pennsylvania’s government to create an ad hoc means of waging war and to change its policy on expansion, the results of which affected the future of Pennsylvania’s relationships with Indian peoples. Indeed, the geographic expansion encouraged Indians dislocated by the war to become closer to New France. When the first war between European empires came to the region with the Seven Years’ War in the 1750s, the effects of the earlier war between Pennsylvania and Maryland still lingered, influencing both the location of frontiers in Pennsylvania and the identity of the colony’s enemies. The frontiers that developed in the 1750s, then, can only be understood through the dramatic changes wrought by this earlier conflict between two British colonies.
Figure 6. The contested borders between Maryland and Pennsylvania. From 1732 to 1738, Maryland and Pennsylvania clashed over control of the western side of the Susquehanna River. Marylanders staked a claim to the land by establishing a community near Thomas Cresap’s house. For six years, Marylanders and Pennsylvanians crossed the river to harass their enemies, culminating in 1736, when a group of Pennsylvanians burned Cresap’s house to the ground.
But what is also notable for our