others in converting the Indians, perhaps because they asked the most of
them. They made them give up all the vices which the Indians knew were
vices, and all the vices that the Indians thought were virtues when
practiced outside of their tribe. They forbade them to lie, to steal, to
kill; they taught them to wash themselves, to put on clothes, to work,
and to earn their bread. Upon these hard terms they had congregations
and villages in several parts of Connecticut, New York, and
Pennsylvania, which flourished for a time against the malice of the
disorderly and lawless settlers around them, but which had yielded
to the persecutions of white men and red men alike when, in 1771, the
chiefs of the Delawares sent messages to the Moravians and invited
them to come out and live among them in Ohio. The Lenni-lenape, as the
Delawares called themselves, had left the East, where they were subject
to the Iroquois, and they now had their chief towns on the Muskingum.
Near the place where the Tuscarawas and Walhonding meet to form the
Muskingum they offered lands to the Moravians, and in 1772 the Christian
Indians left their last village in Western Pennsylvania and settled
there at three points which they called Schönbrun, the Beautiful Spring,
Lichtenau, Field of Light, and Gnadenhutten, the Tents of Grace.
It was in the very heart of the Western wilderness, but the land was
rich and the savages friendly, and in a few years the teachers and their
followers had founded a fairer and happier home than they had known
before, and had begun to spread their light around them. The Indians
came from far and near to see their fields and orchards and gardens,
with the houses in the midst of them, built of squared logs and set on
streets branching to the four quarters from the chapel, which was the
peaceful citadel of each little town. It must have seemed a stately
edifice to their savage eyes, with its shingled roof, and its belfry,
where, ten years before any white man had settled beyond the Ohio,
the bell called the Christian Indians to prayer. No doubt the creature
comforts of the Christians had their charm, too, for the hungry pagans.
They were not used elsewhere to the hospitality that could set before
them such repasts as one of the missionaries tells us were spread for
the guest at Gnadenhutten. A table furnished with “good bread, meat,
butter, cheese, milk, tea and coffee, and chocolate,” and such fruits and
vegetables as the season afforded could hardly have been less wonderful
in the Indian’s eyes than red men with their hair cut, and without paint
or feathers, at work in the fields like squaws.
Their heathen neighbors began to come into the Moravians’ peaceful
fold, and the three villages grew and flourished till the war broke out
between the colonies and Great Britain. Then the troubles and sorrows
of the Moravians, white and red, began again. They were too weak to keep
the savage war parties from passing through their towns, and they dared
not refuse them rest and food. The warriors began to come with the first
leaves of spring, and they came and went till the first snows of autumn
made their trail too plain for them to escape pursuit from the border.
The Moravians did what they could to ransom their captives and to save
them from torture when the warriors returned after their raids, but all
their goodness did not avail them against the suspicion of the settlers.
The backwoodsmen looked on them as the spies and allies of the
savages, and the savages on their side believed them in league with the
Americans.
The Delawares had promised the Moravian teachers that if they settled
among them, the Delaware nation would take no part in the war, and the
most of ‘them kept their promise. But some of the young men broke it,
and the nation would not forbid the Wyandots from passing through
their country to and from the Virginia frontier. It was true that the
Moravians held thousands of Delaware warriors neutral, and that our
American officers knew their great power for good among the Indians;
but the backwoodsmen hated them as bitterly as they hated the Wyandots.
Their war parties passed through the Christian villages, too, when they
went and came on their forays beyond the Ohio, and at one time their
leaders could hardly keep them from destroying a Moravian town, even
while they were enjoying its hospitality.
This situation could not last. In August, 1781, a chief of the Hurons,
called the Half King, came with a large body of Indians flying the
English flag and accompanied by an English officer, to urge the
Christians to remove to Sandusky, where they were told they could be
safe from the Virginians. They refused, and then the Half King shot
their cattle, plundered their fields and houses, and imprisoned their
teachers, and at last forced them away. When the winter came on, the
exiles began to suffer from cold and hunger, and many of their children
died. To keep themselves and their little ones from starving, parties
stole back from Sandusky throughout the winter to gather the corn left
standing in the fields beside the Muskingum.
In March a larger party than usual returned to the deserted villages
with a number of women and children, all unarmed, except for the guns
that the men carried to shoot game. But in February the savages had
fallen upon a lonely cabin and butchered all its inmates with more than
common cruelty, and the whole border was ablaze with fury against the
redskins, whether they called themselves Christians or not. A hundred
and sixty backwoodsmen gathered at Mingo Bottom under the lead of
Colonel David Williamson, who had once disgraced himself among them by
preventing them from killing some Moravian prisoners, and who now seems
to have been willing to atone for his humanity. They marched swiftly to
the Muskingum, where they stole upon the Indians in the cornfields, and
seized their guns. They told them at first that they were going to take
them to Fort Pitt, and at the vote held to decide whether they should
burn their prisoners alive or simply tomahawk and scalp them, there
was really some question of their transfer to Pittsburg. This plan was
favored by the leaders, and it is believed that if Colonel Williamson
could have had his way, it would have been carried out. But there is no
proof of this, and the rest, who were by no means the worst men of the
border, but some of the best, voted by a large majority to kill their
prisoners.
They gave them the night to prepare for death. One poor woman fell on
her knees before Williamson and begged for her life, but the most of
them seem to have submitted without a word. They spent the night in
prayer and singing, and when their butchers sent at daybreak to know if
they were ready, they answered that they had received the assurance of
God’s peace. Then the murderers parted the women and children from the
men and shut them up in another cabin, and the two cabins they fitly
called the slaughterhouses. One of them found a cooper’s mallet in the
cooper’s shop, where the men were left, and saying: “How exactly this
will answer for the business,” he made his way through the kneeling
ranks to one of the most fervent of the converts, and struck him down.
While the Indians still prayed and sang, he killed twelve more of them,
and then passed the mallet to another butcher with the words: “My arm
fails me. Go on in the same way. I think I have done pretty well.” Among
the women and children the slaughter began with a very old and pious
widow, and soon the sound of the singing and the praying was silenced in
death.
The victims were scalped as they fell, and when the bloody work was
done, the cabins were set on fire and the bodies burned in the burning
buildings. Two boys who had been scalped with the rest feigned death,
and when the murderers had left them they tried to escape. One stuck
fast in the window and was burned, but the other got safely away and
lived to tell the awful tale.
[Illustration: Massacre of the Christian Indians by the Whites 087]
The backwoodsmen themselves seem not to have been ashamed of their work,
though it is said that Williamson could never be got to speak of it. The
event was so horrible that it killed the Moravians’ hopes of usefulness
among the Ohio Indians. The teachers settled with the remnant of
their converts in Canada, but the Christian Indians always longed for
Gnadenhutten, where they had lived so happily, and where ninety-six
of their brethren had suffered so innocently. Before the close of the
century Congress confirmed the Delawares’ grant of the Muskingum lands
to them, and they came back. But they could not survive the crime
committed against them. The white settlers pressed close about them; the
War of 1812 enkindled all the old hate against their race. Their laws
were trampled upon and their own people were seen drunk in the streets.
Some of the Christians had fallen back into heathen savagery. One of
these, who was found in a war party, painted and armed like the rest for
a foray against the whites, said to a Christian brother: “I cannot but
have bad thoughts of our teachers. I think it was their fault that so
many of our countrymen were murdered in Gnadenhutten. They betrayed
us.... Tell me now, is this the truth or not?” He had lost his children
and all his kindred in that fearful carnage, and yet he could not
believe his own accusations against the Moravians. He added mournfully:
“I have now a wicked and malicious heart, and therefore my thoughts are
evil. As I look outwardly, so is my heart within. What would it avail,
if I were outwardly to appear as a believer, and my heart were full of
evil?”
IX. THE TORTURE OF COLONEL CRAWFORD
The slaughter of the Christian Indians at Gnadenhutten took place
in March, 1782, and in May ol the same year, four hundred and fifty
horsemen from the American border met at Mingo Bottom, where the
murderers had rendezvoused, and set out from that point to massacre
the Moravian converts who had taken refuge among the Wyandots on the
Sandusky. They expected, of course, to fight the warlike Indians, but
they openly avowed their purpose of killing all Indians, Christian or
heathen, and women and children, as well as warriors. We must therefore
call them murderers, but we must remember that they had been hardened
against mercy by the atrocities of the savages, and we must make
allowance for men who had seen their wives and little ones tomahawked
and scalped or carried off into captivity, their homes burnt, and their
fields wasted. The life of the frontier at a time when all life was so
much ruder than now was as fierce, if not as cruel, among the white men
as among the red men.
The murderers at Mingo Bottom voted whether Colonel David Williamson or
Colonel William Crawford should lead them, and their choice fell upon
Crawford. He seems to have been a man of kinder heart than his fellows,
and he unwillingly took command of the turbulent and disorderly band,
which promptly set out on its march through the wilderness towards the
Sandusky country. They had hoped to surprise the Indians, but spies
had watched their movements from the first, and when they reached the
Moravian villages on the Sandusky River, they found them deserted. They
decided then to go on toward Upper Sandusky, and if they could not reach
that town in a day’s march, to beat a quick retreat. The next day they
started, but at two o’clock in the afternoon they were attacked by large
numbers of Indians hidden in the tall grass of the prairies, and they
fought a running battle till nightfall. Then both sides kindled large
fires along their lines, and fell back from them to prevent a surprise.
In the morning the Americans began their retreat, and the Indians
renewed their attack with great fury in the afternoon, on all sides
except the northeast, where the invaders were hemmed in by swamps. There
seems to have been no cause for their retreat, except the danger of an
overwhelming onset by the savages, which must have been foreseen
from the start. But the army, as it was called, was wholly without
discipline; during the night not even a sentry had been posted; and now
their fear became a panic, their retreat became a rout. They made their
way as best they could through the marshes, where the horses stuck fast,
and had to be abandoned, and the men themselves sometimes sank to their
necks in the soft ooze. Instead of keeping together, as Crawford advised
but had no power to compel, the force broke up into small parties, which
the Indians destroyed or captured. Many perished in the swamps; some
were followed as far as the Ohio River. The only one of the small
parties which escaped was that of forty men under Colonel Williamson,
the leader of the Gnadenhiitten massacre, who enjoyed the happier
fortune denied to Colonel Crawford.
This ill-fated officer was tormented after the retreat began by his fear
for the safety of his son, his son-in-law, and his nephews, and he left
his place at the head of the main body and let the army file past him
while he called and searched for the missing men. He did not try to
overtake it till it was too late to spur his wearied horse forward. He
fell in with Dr. John Knight, who accompanied the expedition as surgeon,
and who now generously remained with Crawford. They pushed on together
with two others through the woods, guided by the north star, but on the
second day after the army had left them behind, a party of Indians fell
upon them and made them prisoners.
Their captors killed their two companions, Captain Biggs and Lieutenant
Ashley, the following day, but Crawford and Knight were taken to an
Indian camp at a little distance, and then to the old Wyandot town of
Sandusky, where preparations were made for burning Crawford. He seems to
have had great hopes that Simon Girty, who was then at Sandusky, would
somehow manage to save him, and it is said that the renegade really
offered three hundred dollars for Crawford’s life, knowing that he would
be many times repaid by Crawford’s friends. But the chief whom Girty
tried to bribe answered, “Do you take me for a squaw?” and threatened,
if Girty said more, to burn him along with Crawford. This is the story
told in Girty’s favor; other stories represent him as indifferent if not
cruel to Crawford throughout. In any case, it ended in Crawford’s return
to the Indian camp, eight miles from the Indian town, where he suffered
death.
The chiefs who had been put in charge of him were two Delawares of great
note, Captain Pipe and Captain Wingenund. They were chosen his guards
because the Christian Indians were of their nation, and the Delawares,
more than any other nation, were held to have been injured and insulted
by their massacre. It was Captain Pipe who refused Girty’s offer, if
Girty ever made it, and it was Captain Pipe who urged the death of the
prisoners, while treating them with mock politeness. Nine others were
brought back from the town with Knight and Crawford, and Captain Pipe
now painted all their faces black, the sign of doom. While he was
painting Knight’s face, he told him that he should be taken to see
his friends at the Shawnee village, and he told Crawford that his head
should be shaved, meaning that he should be made an Indian and adopted
into the tribe. But when they came to the place where Crawford was to
suffer, Captain Pipe threw off the mask of kindness; he made a speech to
the forty warriors and seventy squaws and papooses met to torture him,
and used all his eloquence to inflame their hate.
The other Delaware chief, Captain Wingenund, had gone into his cabin,
that he might not see Crawford’s death. They knew each other, and more
than once Crawford had been good to Wingenund. The captive now sent for
the chief, and Wingenund came unwillingly to speak with him, for he was
already tied to the stake, and his friend knew that he could not save
him. The chief acknowledged the kindness that they had once felt for
each other, but he said that Crawford had put it out of his power to
give him help.
[Illustration: Execution of Crawford 093]
“How so, Captain Wingenund?” asked Crawford.
“By joining yourself to that execrable man, Williamson; the man who but
the other day murdered such a number of Moravian Indians, knowing them
to be friends; knowing that he ran no risk in murdering a people who
would not fight, and whose only business was praying.”
In vain, Crawford declared that he would never have suffered the
massacre if he had been present. Wingenund was willing to believe
this, but he reminded him that the men whom he had led to Sandusky had
declared that they came to murder the remaining Moravians. No one, he
said, would now dare to speak a word for him; the king of England, if he
came with all his treasure, could not save him from the vengeance which
the Indians were going to take upon him for the slaughter of their
innocent brethren.
“Then my fate is fixed,” said Crawford.
Wingenund turned away weeping, and could never afterwards speak of the
scene without deep feeling.
Crawford had already undergone the first of his punishment. The savages
stripped him naked and made him sit down on the ground before the fire
kindled to burn him, and beat him with their fists and with sticks
till they had heated their rage. Then they tied his wrists together
and fastened the rope that bound them to a post strongly planted in the
ground with leash enough to let him walk round it once or twice, five or
six yards away from the fire. Girty was present, and Crawford asked if
the Indians meant to burn him; the renegade briefly answered, “Yes.”
Then Captain Pipe spoke, and Wingenund saw his friend for the last time.
After this chief left Crawford, the Indians broke into a loud yell and
began the work of torture which ended only with his death.
At one point he besought Simon Girty to put an end to his sufferings;
but Girty would not, or dared not.
Then Crawford began to pray, imploring God to have mercy upon him, and
bore his torment for an hour and a half longer with manly courage. It is
not known how long his torture lasted; Knight was now taken away, and no
friend remained to witness Crawford’s agony to the end.
I have thought it well to recount his story, for without it we could not
fully realize what the white people of that day underwent in their long
struggle with the Ohio Indians. Cruelty so fiendish could never have
a cause, but it cannot be denied that the torture of Crawford was the
effect of the butchery of the Christian Indians. That awful deed was an
act of even greater wickedness, for it was the act of men who were not
savage by birth or race or creed. It was against the white man’s law,
while the torture of Crawford was by the red man’s law. It is because
of their laws that the white men have overcome and the red men have gone
under in the order of mercy, for whenever we sin against that order,
contrary to our law, or according to our law, we weaken ourselves, and
if we continue in our sin, we doom ourselves in the end to perish.
X. THE ESCAPE OF KNIGHT AND SLOVER.
When the Indians made a raid on the settlements, they abandoned even
victory if they had once had enough fighting; as when they had a feast
they glutted themselves, and then wasted what they had not eaten. They
seemed now to have had such a surfeit of cruelty in the torture of
Crawford that they took little trouble to secure Knight for a future
holiday. They promised themselves that he should be burnt, too, at the
town of the Shawnees, but in their satiety they left him unbound in the
charge of a young Indian who was to take him there from Sandusky. It is
true that Knight was very weak, and that they may have thought he was
unable to escape, though even in this case they would probably have sent
him under a stronger guard at another time, when they were not gorged
with blood.
His Indian guard was armed and was mounted on a pony, while Knight went
on foot; but Knight had made up his mind that he would escape at any
risk rather than be burned like Crawford. His face had again been
painted black; and he had Simon Girty’s word, given him before Crawford
was put to death, that he was to be burned at Old Chillicothe. But he
pretended not to know what the Indians were going to do with him there,
and he easily deceived his guard, who seems to have been a good-natured,
simple fellow. Knight asked him if they were going to live together like
brothers in the same wig-wam, and the Indian answered they were, and
they went in very friendly talk. At night-fall when they camped, Knight
let his guard bind him, but he spent the hours till daybreak trying
secretly to free himself. At dawn the Indian rose and unbound his
captive. Then he rekindled the fire, at the same time fighting the gnats
that swarmed upon his naked body. He willingly consented that Knight
should make a smoke to drive them from his back, and Knight took a heavy
stick from the fire as if to do this; but when he got behind the Indian
he struck him on the head with all his strength. The Indian fell forward
into the fire, but quickly gathered himself up and ran off howling.
Knight wanted to shoot him as he ran; in his eagerness to cock the rifle
he broke the lock, and the Indian escaped. He got safely to the Shawnee
town, where he described the fight in terms that transformed the little
doctor into a furious giant, whom no amount of stabbing had any effect
upon.
[Illustration: Knight escapes 097L]
The other Indians, who seem to have understood this cowardly boaster,
received his story with shouts of laughter. But Knight was very glad
to make off with his gun and ammunition, and leave them to settle the
affair among themselves. When he came to the prairies he hid himself in
the grass and waited till dark before venturing to cross them, and
by daybreak he was in the woods again. He could kill nothing with his
broken gun, and he lived for twenty-one days on wild gooseberries, with
two young blackbirds and a tortoise, which he ate raw. He reached the
Ohio River on the twenty-second day, and crossed in safety to Fort
Mcintosh.
The tragic adventures of the Indian captives must often have been
relieved by comic incidents like those of Knight’s escape from his
guard; but there is very little record of anything except sorrow and
suffering, danger and death. Certainly in the captivity of John Slover,
another of Crawford’s ill-starred and ill-willed crew of marauders,
there were few gleams of happier chance to distinguish it from most
histories of the sort. He had been captured by the Indians when a boy
of eight years, and carried from his home in Virginia to their town of
Sandusky, where he was adopted into their nation, and where he lived
quite happily till his twentieth year, when he was given up to his own
people.
He fought through two years of the Revolutionary War, and he was
thoroughly fitted to act as a guide for Crawford.
After the battle, or rather the disorderly rout, he was one of those who
was mired in the swamps. He left his horse there, and with a few others
tried to make his way to Detroit. Twice the party escaped capture by
hiding in the grass, as the Indians passed near them, but on the third
morning they were ambushed; two were killed, one ran away, and the
remaining three gave themselves up on the promise of good treatment.
They were taken to Wapatimika, where Simon Kenton was to have been
burned, and they soon proved how far the promises of the savages were to
be trusted.