From “Undoing Manifest Destiny: Settler America, Christian Colonists, and the Pursuit of Justice” by L. Daniel Hawk
The Bible, the Paxton Boys believed, clearly directed what they should do to the nations that inhabited the land God had given to them. From this perspective, then, the affront to God did not lie in the massacre but in the colonial authorities’ refusal to exterminate the Indians. In the end, the settler response followed the script of Gnadenhutten and virtually all settler massacres throughout the period of western expansion: outrage, an official review, and no action taken against the perpetrators.
Among the demands that the Pennsylvania legislature granted the Paxton Boys was the restoration of a scalp bounty. Where and how scalping originated is the subject of considerable debate. Whatever the origins, colonial governments issued payment for scalps in times of conflict as a way of inducing settlers to extirpate (that is, exterminate) Indigenous groups they considered hostile. During the eighteenth century, all colonies issued bounties at one time or another. Some offered huge financial incentives. In 1756, Lieutenant Governor Robert Hunt Morris of Pennsylvania offered a bounty of 130 pieces of eight for the scalp of Lenape males over twelve and 50 pieces of eight for Lenape women (although the bounty faced strenuous opposition and appears to have expired within a few months). In 1723, Massachusetts issued a bounty of 100 pounds for the scalps of male Indians and 10 pounds for those of women.
The impact of scalp bounties, however, extended beyond the number of Indigenous people who were slain. The bounties in essence dissolved the boundaries between military and noncombatants and, in some cases, between allied and enemy nations. A scalp did not announce its tribal identity nor often its gender. The bounties thus incentivized killing and intensified the level of frontier violence. “Scalp hunting,” writes John Grenier, “offered American frontiersmen acting as entrepreneurs de guerre the potential for an economic windfall…By embracing scalp hunting, American society, besides commercializing war, had made the killing of noncombatants a legitimate act of war” and a “permanent feature of both the colonial frontier economy and Americans’ way of war.