Page:The Red Man and the White Man in North America.djvu/377

Rh after imploring appeals and impassioned remonstrances, they were induced to vote a sum of money as a supply for the defence of the province, they prudently called it a gift for the service of the King. But the time came, with the straits of dire necessity, when those Philadelphia Quakers were found armed and drilled, with all the stern paraphernalia of fight and battle, with cannon planted in their barricaded streets. And that battle array was forced upon them, not for an encounter with actual Indians invading their city, but to ward off a troop of well-nigh maddened rustics, — the Paxton Boys, — the survivors and champions of their murdered neighbors, who came to insist that the peace policy should no longer trifle with the dire emergency. Hardly, under the circumstances, are we staggered at reading the tariff of bounties already mentioned, which the governor, grandson of William Penn, offered by proclamation, — as, for a male Indian prisoner, above ten years old, one hundred and fifty Spanish dollars; for a female, one hundred and thirty dollars; for the scalp of such a male, one hundred and thirty-four dollars, — of a female, fifty dollars. The Assembly voted to send three hundred men to aid in protecting the frontiers; and by the earnest request of Colonel Bouquet, as he informed General Amherst, the commissioners agreed to send to England for fifty couples of bloodhounds to be used by the Rangers on horseback against Indian-scalping parties. It was remarkable that the accumulation of all that is harrowing and desolating in the methods and atrocities of Indian warfare should have been visited upon the province which in the purpose and policy of its proprietary founder was expressly and solemnly pledged to just and amicable relations with the savages. It is but right, therefore, to make recognition of the fact that the Quakers had no initiative agency in these hostilities, and did their utmost, even to what seemed an indulgence in supineness, apathy, and indifference to the calamities visited upon the white