Ghost River: A Virtual Gallery Tour

Welcome to the Library Company. I am Will Fenton, the Director of Research and Public Programs here, and I had the pleasure of serving as the curator of this unusual exhibit. This exhibit is a companion piece to a wonderful graphic novel that we published called Ghost River, The Fall and Rise of the Conestoga, and it was supported thanks to the generosity of the Pew Center for Arts and Heritage. So before I dive into this exhibition, allow me to give you a little bit of context. This is about a little-known colonial bit of history that I think everybody sort of walks past around here but maybe takes for granted. It's called the Paxton Massacres of 1763. So imagine it's December 1763. There's an unsteady, fragile peace right now after the Seven Years' War, and just before Christmas that year, December 14th, a group of somewhere between 50 and 200 former militiamen named the Paxton Boys, called that because they were from a little township called the Paxton Township. They were former militiamen, marched on Conestoga, Indiantown. Now Conestoga, Indiantown was a very special place because it was founded by William Penn alongside the founding of Pennsylvania itself, and so when they chose to attack Conestoga, Indiantown, they were really repudiating the status quo. They were pushing back against everything that had existed to that point. So they murdered in cold blood six men, women, and children in Conestoga, Indiantown, and then they pursued the surviving 14 to Lancaster, which isn't far away, but that's where the Conestoga people were taken in for their safekeeping. And there they finished the job, unfortunately. They murdered the remaining 14 men, women, and children, desecrated the bodies, and really intended it as a public event because they did all of this in the light of day and in a public space. They did it outside in a garden. So at this point, Pennsylvania's government, the proprietors, took in the remaining so-called Christian Indians. These are native peoples with whom settlers regularly traded and had all sorts of different exchanges. 140 Moravian and Christianized Lenape were taken into Philadelphia for their protection. It was upon this moment that the Paxton boys, growing in numbers, vowed to march because they felt they needed to inspect these indigenous peoples. And so they got as far as Germantown, which is about six miles north of Philadelphia, and there they were met by a militia and a delegation led by none other than Benjamin Franklin, who intervened to try to dispel the violence before it went any further. And he persuaded them to publish their grievances. And that publication that they put out, called the Declaration and Remonstrance, really was the first spark of a pamphlet war. And that pamphlet war, I think, bears a really interesting comparison to the social media battles of today. It was waged very vociferously, using pseudonyms, and often published anonymously. And these pamphlets were produced very quickly and traveled widely. And that is typically what we as scholars, what we as historians pay a lot of attention to, because that's where the paper trail is. But the pamphlet war only really tells you the kind of debate that was happening here in Philadelphia, the kind of debate that was being had amongst people that had access to a printing press. And so what this whole project is about, it's about telling the story of this incident and its aftermath, an aftermath that really reshaped Pennsylvania politics. But telling it from a different perspective, telling it from the perspective of the indigenous people, the Conestoga, the Lenni-Lenape, the Moravian Indians, and their kin. And imagining how you would tell this story using colonial records, but not necessarily totally beholden to them. And that is the emergence of the graphic novel. And this exhibition is really intended to sort of open up the graphic novel, the process behind it, that collaboration between scholars and artists that I think was really special about this particular project. So the first thing you'll notice about this exhibition is that it's unlike any other library company exhibition. Normally we have lots of tables of glass with old books and beautiful old manuscripts and cartoons and engravings. We have some of that here. But the vast majority of this space, this modest space, is really devoted to the artwork behind the graphic novel. And throughout all of the cases you'll see juxtaposed against our original 18th century and 19th century materials, you'll see various versions, iterations of the graphic novel as it was being developed. So you'll see pencils, you'll see inks, you'll see the notebook that our artists used to track her thinking about this, you'll see her palette. All of that is interwoven and given the same sort of space, the same kind of hierarchy as everything else in these cases. And so this is a very unusual space. It's a lot more open than other exhibitions and that is by design because we want people to feel like they can sort of flow around this entire exhibition space and follow their own interests. So with that, let me do what a good scholar would always do and talk a little bit about the historical materials that we have in the cases. These really tell a story together that begins with explicating the mythologies behind the way that we think about Pennsylvania and how that sort of comes into tension and conflict with reality. Then to the second case, that really brings us to the actual Paxton incident and what unfolded there. And finally to the third case, the public debate about the incident that really helped to concretize how it is we think about what happened and who is to blame. So let's begin with this first case and I want to start with an image that I think is familiar to a lot of Pennsylvanians, but I think actually it's probably familiar to a lot of us. It's Penn's Treaty with the Indians and here you see John Hall's engraving, which is made off of Benjamin West's painting, his famous painting from 1771. This was commissioned by Thomas Penn, the governor at that time of Pennsylvania, the son of William Penn. And Thomas Penn had a political interest in having this image produced, namely that he wanted to celebrate this peaceable history that he and his family supposedly presided over. And yet just six years before, there was this horrible violence that we're exploring in the case of the Paxton incident. So I think you have this image that's commissioned in 1770, five, six years after the Paxton affair, ten years after the Seven Years' War, that really celebrates this idea of benevolence, of settlers and Indians coming together on somewhat equal footing and coming together with some kind of understanding that allows peace and prosperity. And yet this was never fully accurate. This was always a political image. And so juxtaposed against this image in this case, we have Hueshoyo, our artist, rendering of this. So Hueshoyo Alvitre is of the Tongva people out in Los Angeles. And one of the reasons that I sought her out as the artist for this graphic novel, and really as the force behind so much of the interpretation that happens here, is that she has a lot of experience working with historical records and really challenging us to think about the social justice imperatives behind them. This is the Treaty of Shackamaxon. This is the treaty that makes Philadelphia proper Philadelphia. This is the treaty that makes Pennsylvania a possibility. And so there were wampum belts, these quahog shells that are woven together in these very complicated patterns that were extremely laborious, but they were also quite valuable in treaty making, also valuable in economics. And so the wampum belts that celebrate this particular treaty, the Shackamaxon belt, we know for a fact that the Conestoga actually had one of those belts. We don't know ultimately how they lost it. We suspect that it was actually confiscated in the second attack at the Lancaster workhouse. But what we've chosen here, and you'll see sort of annotated in the actual text, the graphic novel that we produced, so we've made a choice to place that wampum belt, that symbol of treaty making, in the ashes of Conestoga Indian town. And I think what's really special about this case is that it actually only has one historical material in it. You have the Benjamin West painting that's been engraved by John Hall. That's our original archival material juxtaposed with the entire life cycle of this one page from the graphic novel. That begins with Weshoyo's notebook, her sketchbook, and you can see on top of that her palette and a 19th century gold nib that she used for doing all of her ink work. But then you also see reproductions of the pencil page, the ink page, and then the final watercolor page. So you can really see the entire emergence of this reinterpretation of that scene. Now our second case does some really interesting work because you have a lot more archival material, but you're seeing different types of archival material than folks typically associate with the Paxton Pamphlet War. So this case is really all about what happened and how it was depicted and interpreted. And normally we turn specifically to text. So we have a broadside, for example, like a big poster that would have been hung up on tavern walls or out in public spaces. That certainly is the kind of material we typically attend to as scholars. But one of the things that the library company has that's really special is an amazing graphic arts department. And they have these amazing political cartoons from this particular period. It's one of the largest collections of political cartoons in the world. And so what we've used here is we've pulled together several political cartoons between the second and third case that represent how this was depicted in terms of the iconography of this particular affair. But then at the front you have sort of the most well-known image associated with the Paxton incident and that's John Wimmer's Massacre at Lancaster. So this is a depiction of that second attack on the remaining 14 Conestoga at the Lancaster Workhouse on December 27th. But if you take a closer look at this, you'll see that it doesn't look quite right because you'll see that the men who are doing the massacring, the so-called Paxton boys, are recast as Jacksonian Democrats. They're wearing top hats and Victorian attire, all of which suggests that Wimmer is using this for political purposes in the 1840s when he produced this image. You know what's wild? This image is the first to actually show or to depict in some way the violence of this scene and it wasn't produced until 1841. That's 60, 70 years after this incident. So more often than not you see all sorts of depictions of the crowds that are gathering in Philadelphia. You have images that would sort of document the warfare that folks would have witnessed firsthand on the frontier. But there weren't any images contemporaneous with the Paxton affair that showed the brutal violence that the Paxton boys pursued against the indigenous peoples at Conestoga Indian town at Lancaster. So what you'll see in the Wimmer engraving, it's actually a lithograph embedded in this text, Events in Indian History, is really a scene of victimization where these Jacksonian Democrat Paxton boys are murdering in cold blood the indigenous peoples. It is really a tragic image that plays up the defenselessness of the Conestoga people. What I think is powerful in our juxtaposition in this case is that we have reinterpretation of this scene. In here you'll see not the Conestoga people on their knees pleading for their lives but standing in defiance. And then what happens to the violence? You don't actually see it. Instead she abstracts it and renders it through the beadwork of that Shackamax Entreaty belt. But instead of the belt being whole, the way that we saw in the last scene, it's been rendered. It's been torn to pieces. And there is an insinuation of the gore here because there's the red in this image. But really this is intended to move away from the fetishization of Indian violence that so often gets reproduced in the historical images associated with this incident. So the final case really brings us back to the library company's bread and butter, which are the pamphlets. Library Company and our neighbor next door, the Historical Society of Pennsylvania. Between these two collections we have something like 70 pamphlets that were published in the Paxton Affair. So between 1763 and 1765, something like a quarter, maybe a fifth, of all printed material in the colony of Pennsylvania had to do with this incident. You had Paxton apologists rushing to jump in and blame feckless Quakers for ineffectual governance. To charge that native peoples had no place in the Pennsylvania colony. And then you had Paxton critics really racing in to try to shape public opinion against the Paxtons and their allies, to say that they were lawless, that there were a bunch of rioters, that they defied the law and order that was really entitled to the colony by the power of the crown. And so the pamphlets that have circulating here really give you a sense of those kinds of debates, both against the Paxtons and sympathetic to the Paxtons. And you'll see that the Declaration and Remonstrance, which is the pamphlet that was originally published by the Paxton leaders immediately after they reached Germantown, that actually appears the way that they would have looked at the time. So back in the 18th century, they didn't come bound like this. This is an artifact of the 20th century when everything got rebound. Instead, they came sewn together, stitched together, and they were made out of very cheap paper and circulated extremely widely. So this pamphlet is untouched. It gives you an idea of what these pamphlets look like when they would have circulated at the time. And I think importantly, you also have Benjamin Franklin's pamphlet. He was technically the first pamphleteer of the Paxton pamphlet war. People forget that because there's so much attention to the Paxton leaders' grievances. But Franklin tried to get ahead of the story, and he put out his narrative of the late massacres, in which he really challenged the Paxton boys, not on really humanitarian grounds, though he does make some arguments there, but on the grounds that they had violated law and order in the colony, and that they hadn't shown the Conestoga and other neighboring indigenous peoples' hospitality rights. That was their sin, that they had violated hospitality rights. All of this still, I think, pushes forward the notion that if you're entitling someone with hospitality rights, you're imagining them as a guest, somebody that's going to eventually leave. It presupposes that the colony is for white European settlers. And that is really what we're trying to push back against here throughout this entire exhibition, but particularly in this very last corner of the exhibition space. Because here, you'll see that we've integrated an actual physical wampum belt. It's actually like a little choker that would be meant to be worn around the neck. And this is not a historical artifact. This was actually produced by a Wampanoag artist named Elizabeth James Perry, incredible artist. And she makes all of these belts, jewelry, bracelets, exactly as they would have been made 500 years ago. So they're all done by hand. And I thought it was really important to give visitors two things. One would be the sense of the materiality of these objects. And so that's why you have the quahog shell from which it's carved, juxtaposed against the end product, the bead strung on the deer skin. But I think it's also important that this isn't a contemporary artist, because I think it's very easy to say, this is all in the past. This is a story from long ago. The natives are gone. They only live out in Oklahoma. That's where the Delaware people are based today. But one of the things that we're trying to push back against with this exhibition and with this project more broadly, is the notion that these indigenous peoples have not endured, and even thrived in their own way. And so it was important to create a space for another contemporary native artist to show her work. And I'm really grateful that the Pew Center allowed us to purchase this artifact, because this wampum belt is now going to be part of the collections at one of America's oldest colonial institutions. And I think that that's a really powerful political act. So with that, I'd like take you around the walls now, because I really do see this as the centerpiece of this exhibition. This is an art exhibition that happens to have a lot of history in it. And so I want to give the artwork that Weshoyo has created using the story of Lee Francis of the Laguna Pueblo. And I think it's a marvelous narrative that is deeply unsettling for readers, but at the same time accessible to anyone that really can work through a graphic novel. So please join me on the opposite end of our exhibition space. So right here, this is really where our exhibition begins. And it begins, fittingly, at the beginning of the graphic novel. This is the opening spread of Ghost River, The Fall and Rise of the Conestoga. And this is a Lenape origin story. So when I say we are beginning at the beginning, we aren't beginning at the beginning of the Paxton Boys affair. We aren't beginning at the beginning of the Seven Years War in the 1750s, or even the arrival of William Penn in Pennsylvania, or what would be called Pennsylvania in 1680. This takes us all the way back to the beginning of time. It moves us outside of the Western conception of time and onto the Native conception of time. This was something that our author, Lee Francis, understood was very important. And so he went out of his way to think about a way that we could reframe this story so that it was happening on Native terrain. And so this is a wonderful depiction, a wonderfully intricate depiction also, of a Lenape creation story of Turtle Island. You'll see allusions to Turtle Island all over the place, but I think most people don't actually know the narrative. And so we hope that the graphic novel will introduce people to this origin story. But what I think is really special about this particular image is, first of all, you get a sense of its size. This is 22 inches across and 17 inches tall. And all of this was done meticulously by hand with that gold nib ink work, including every little etching here, and then hand-painted with watercolors from a natural pigment, a company called Pigment Finder. West Cholla was very committed to using all natural pigments, but also honoring the kinds of colors that would be available to 18th century painters. So you see a lot of the colors here actually have a sort of common language, a common vocabulary with what you see in the Benjamin West painting. So at the very beginning of this project, we went on a research trip, and we went to all the different archives that we could think that had materials. And that was important, but as important was really getting out to the landscape. So we rented a bus, we went out to the historical site of Conestoga Indian Town, we went out to the Hans Herr house, we went out to the Lancaster area where the workhouse would have been. And we also met with the Circle Legacy Center, a local indigenous group at the Mennonite church out there. And throughout all of that, we had conversations with living Native peoples that identified as the kin or the ancestors of the Conestoga people. And one of the things that they kept talking about were the petroglyphs along the water. Turns out that along the Susquehanna River, which is the Ghost River in the allusion of this title, there are these petroglyphs carved into the stones that really date back hundreds and hundreds of years. They're wonderfully ornate. And I think one of the special things that Weshoyo did was in this origin story, it's really a much larger origin story of the Lenape people more broadly. She's embedded actual petroglyphs that you can see today along the Susquehanna River. You could see them here woven into the black space of this opening image. So we've continued along that first wall, and we started with the Lenape origin story. And frankly, it's very hard for me to choose just one image to focus on here. But in the interest of time, I want to focus on another spread, this spread here that's being rendered through wampum. So remember that we already have wampum integrated into our cases in terms of the depiction of the Benjamin West Treaty. And then we also have the actual physical wampum belt in that third case. But here, Weshoyo's come up with this really, I think, powerful and ingenious way of depicting the violence at Conestoga, Indian Town. So in the worst of that violence, instead of showing the rending of the belt as if the beads themselves are the individuals over the snow, the black beads on the white snow, here she's placed everything in one coherent wampum belt. And you could see sort of some intimation of the violence that's unfolding, but it's abstracted because it's almost like it's being pixelated through each one of those individual beads. And I think what's really powerful about this is, again, it avoids the fetishization of Indian killing that so often accompanies narratives about colonial history. It also quite literally places the power of the story and the storytelling in Native hands, as you can see here. So along the wall that's closest to our actual research library is a very special space because this is where we invite all of our patrons to participate in the reinterpretive process. And really, you could see that set up with this image behind me. So this image of a plaque on a stone is actually taken from our visit to what was Conestoga, Indian Town. There actually is a plaque with a stone, with lettering, of course. But all of that lettering, I think, is, it feels quite dated, and it feels very biased towards the Paxton men, in that sense of the narrative. So what we've chosen to do in the graphic novel and this exhibition is to really efface that lettering and to invite our patrons to think about how they would tell this story. And that reinterpreted process really begins here at this station. Here we've repurposed one of our cases. We've invited people to pull up a bench, to sit down, and to explore the graphic novel and to record their thoughts. And we have some wonderful thoughts, particularly from all the school groups that have gone through. But of course, as important as that is really making the actual physical graphic novel available. Because I think it's important that people be able to hold this in their hands, to think about its size, to open it up and page through, and to explore all the context that's really integrated throughout. Because as proud as I am of my labels that I've written for all of these various cases, I think that it's very hard to tell this story without the necessary context. And one of the things that's powerful about this graphic novel is that half of it is the graphic novel, and the other half is the interpretive apparatus. Interpretive apparatus is just a fancy way of saying the context, the way of thinking about it. So that means that this graphic novel includes artist statements from the artist, Weshoyo, and the author, Lee, and the editor, myself. It also includes an annotated script that allows you to see quite visually all of the conversations that we had about each page of the script. So who we consulted with, how we made the decisions that we made, and the kinds of conversations that we had back and forth. I think it's very important to honor that process. So we embedded that. We created a space for that in this graphic novel. Of course, also in the graphic novel are reproductions of some of the archival materials that I've already talked about, as well as a whole unit, a teacher's unit, for middle school and high school students in public schools, developed by our friends and colleagues at the Gilder Lerman Institute of American History. And I think you'll find that if you do engage this through the digital edition, ghostriver.org, there's even more to be had. So the ghostriver.org includes not just that original unit developed by the experts at the Gilder Lerman Institute, but also from almost two dozen faculty from across the country, primary and secondary educators, who attended a teacher seminar that we led around this particular institute in collaboration with the Gilder Lerman Institute and the University of Pennsylvania. So this is a starting point. We've made this small enough and inexpensive enough that it's easily distributed widely. But really, the ghostriver.org, that digital edition, is really intended to open up the process even further. And our goal here is to support primary and secondary educators who might want to tell this story in their classrooms. And so far, judging from the way that the students have responded to this, we're off to a good start. So this exhibition really seeks to honor a couple of things. First of all, that really deep research that went into this. I mean, this is really the outgrowth of my own doctoral work. I wrote a dissertation on this material. And so it's very important for me to be as faithful to the historical records and to tell this story as carefully as I possibly can, as widely in terms of my consultation as possible. But it's also really an exhibition with a conscience. This is an exhibition that really seeks to honor the present and to read these historical materials from the vantage point of the present, and particularly a Native present. Because I think that that's something that often gets lost in these kinds of exhibitions. We so often provide Native folks a voice in the past, but deny them a place in the present. And so I think it's very important that in this exhibition, we found different ways to surface not only the work of Weshoyo and Lee, contemporary artist and author here, but also other stakeholders, I should say. And that includes Elizabeth James Perry, who created that beautiful wampum belt. And that also includes all of our friends and colleagues at the Circle Legacy Center. And so in embedding them in that last wall, I really hope that folks who attend this exhibition, who have a time to work through it, are left with a sense that this isn't just a historical incident that can be relegated to the past, but rather that this incident is, yes, a tragic story about a white supremacist campaign in the 18th century, but also a story of resilience, of endurance, of Native peoples surviving here and continuing to maintain their traditions, despite all of the challenges that have been placed around them. And so I'd like to reiterate by saying I'm really grateful to everybody at the Library Company who made this possible. But I'm really, really grateful to the Pew Center for Arts and Heritage for taking a chance on this crazy idea and supporting us every step of the way. Thank you.