Accordingly, the Cartledges were arrested and confined in Philadelphia, and the high-sheriff of Chester County went, with two influential men of the province, to Conestoga, to confer with the Indians as to what should be done with them. The Indians were unwilling to decide the matter without advice from the Five Nations, to whom they owed allegiance. A swift runner (Satcheecho) was, therefore, sent northward with the news of the occurrence; and the governor, with two of his council, went to Albany to hear what the Five Nations had to say about it. What an inconceivable spectacle to us to-day: the governments of Pennsylvania and New York so fully recognizing an Indian to be a "person," and his murder a thing to be anxiously and swiftly atoned for if possible!
Only a little more than a hundred and fifty years lie between this murder of Saanteenee in Conestoga and the murder of Big Snake on the Ponca Reservation in 1880. Verily, Policy has kept a large assortment of spectacles for Justice to look through in a surprising short space of time.
On the decision of the king and chiefs of the Five Nations hung the fate of the murderers. Doubtless the brothers Cartledge made up their minds to die. The known principles of the Indians in the matter of avenging injuries certainly left them little room for hope. But no! The Five Nations took a different view. They "desired that the Cartledges should not suffer death, and the affair was at length amicably settled," says the old record. "One life," said the Indian king, "on this occasion, is enough to be lost. There should not two die."
This was in 1722. In 1763 there were only twenty of these Conestoga Indians left—seven men, five women, and eight children. They were still living in their village on the Shawanee Creek, their lands being assured to them by manorial gift; but they were miserably poor—earned by making brooms, baskets, and wooden bowls a part of their living, and begged the rest. They were wholly peaceable and unoffending, friendly to their white neighbors, and pitifully clinging and affectionate, naming their children after whites who were kind to them, and striving in every way to show their gratitude and good-will.