Page:Early western travels, 1748-1846 (1907 Volume 4).djvu/51

 him, until reminded by seeing some travellers pass on horseback, whom he hastened to overtake for the sake of their company. He did not however neglect finishing his whiskey, which he swallowed with great gout, and on mounting his horse, cracked jokes about a buxom widow, at whose tavern beyond Carlisle, he proposed sleeping that night. Among other stories with which he had entertained me, he told me the particulars of the massacre of the Indians at Lancaster, and he took a good deal of pride to himself, for having been one of the heroes who had assisted on that memorably disgraceful expedition. In justice however to the old man, I must observe that he related with pleasure that the party he accompanied, arrived too late in Lancaster to assist in the carnage.[11]

{28} As this is a circumstance not generally known, it may not be amiss to introduce here a short account of it.—The Conestoga Indians, as they were called, from their residence near the banks of Conestoga creek, were the remains of a tribe of the Six nations, who entered into a treaty with William Penn the first proprietor of the then province of Pennsylvania, towards the close of the seventeenth century, by which they had a thousand acres of land assigned them in*