The Paxton Boys and Edward Shippen: Defiance and Deference on a Collapsing Frontier

The horror of a collapsing frontier haunted Edward Shippen once he moved to Lancaster. Shippen expected that frontiersmen from places such as Paxton to keep that demon at bay, but in December 1763 these frontiersmen rejected the part that Lancaster’s elites assigned them. In targeting the Conestoga Indians, the Paxton Boys sent a message less to Philadelphia’s provincial authorities than to nearby elites such as Shippen, who failed to act, frontiersmen believed, as a local patriarch should.