In June 1782, an officer of the Continental Army stood bound among his captors, facing a death he had been told he could not escape. Colonel William Crawford had been taken by Delaware Indians after a failed expedition against their towns along the Sandusky River in Ohio. The warriors who held him had already decided his punishment: death by torture. As the preparations began, Crawford thought of an old acquaintance, a Delaware chief named Winganund, a man he had entertained in happier times and who had shown him kindness.

With little left to lose, Crawford asked that the chief be sent for. The request was granted, and Winganund came. The violence that brought Crawford to this moment had been building for years along the American frontier. Most of the killing flowed in one direction, with hostile Indian war parties descending on settler cabins, murdering families, burning homes, destroying livestock, and carrying off women and children into captivity.

But occasionally the settlers struck back. One such attack, the Gnadenhutten massacre of 1782, became notorious because the victims were peaceful Christian Indians, not warriors. A militia band under the command of a man named Williamson fell upon the Moravian converts at their town on the Sandusky, killing them without regard to age or sex. The slaughter outraged the hostile tribes and set in motion a chain of revenge.

Not satisfied with the first massacre, Williamson’s band soon marched again toward Sandusky, intending to murder the remaining Moravian converts who had survived the earlier attack. But Providence had intervened. The Moravian ministers had been taken from their flock and carried to Detroit by order of the British government, leaving the converts unprotected and uncertain. They had abandoned their town before the militia arrived, and Williamson’s men found nothing but empty huts.

Disappointed, they turned their course toward the hostile Indian villages. There, contrary to their expectations, they were furiously attacked. Williamson and his men took advantage of a dark night and escaped, but not everyone got away. Colonel Crawford and one other were captured and carried in triumph to the Indian village, where Crawford was condemned to die by torture.

His fellow prisoner was demanded by the Shawnee and sent to them for punishment. As the preparations for Crawford’s execution began, he remembered Winganund. The chief had been his friend in better days, and Crawford had entertained him at his house, showing him the kind of attention that was so often denied to Indians. A ray of hope passed through him, and he asked that Winganund be sent for.

The messenger was dispatched, and the chief came, reluctantly but without hesitation. Winganund was one of the most celebrated warriors of the Delaware nation, but also one of its most humane men. To a firm and undaunted mind he joined kindness and universal benevolence, and the qualities of his heart had earned him the name Winganund, which in the Lenape language meant the well-beloved. He had kept away from the tragic scene about to be enacted, mourning in silence over the fate of his guilty friend, knowing that it was not in his power to prevent it.

Now he was called upon to play a painful and difficult part. The eyes of his enraged countrymen were fixed upon him. He was a Delaware, a leader of the very nation whose defenseless members had been cruelly murdered without distinction of age or sex, and whose innocent blood called aloud for revenge. Could he take the part of a chief of the base murderers?

Could he forget the feelings of ancient fellowship and give way entirely to the demands of the Indian and the patriot? Knowing that the latter must at least appear to prevail, he summoned the firmness and dignity of a warrior, approached Crawford, and waited in silence. Crawford spoke first. “Do you recollect me, Winganund?

”

“I believe I do. Are you not Colonel Crawford? ”

“I am. ”

“How do you do?

I am glad to see you, Captain. ”

“Yes, indeed. Do you recollect the friendship that always existed between us, and that we were always glad to see each other? ”

“I recollect all this.

I remember that we have drunk many a bowl of punch together. I remember also acts of kindness that you have done me. ”

“Then I hope the same friendship still subsists between us. ”

“It would of course be the same were you in your proper place and not here.

”

“And why not here, Captain? I hope you would not desert a friend in time of need. Now is the time for you to exert yourself in my behalf, as I should do for you were you in my place. ”

Winganund answered with grief.

Crawford had placed himself in a situation that put it out of the chief’s power, and out of the power of all his friends, to do anything for him. He had joined himself to Williamson, the man who had murdered so many Moravian Indians, knowing them to be friends, knowing that he ran no risk in killing a people who would not fight and whose only business was praying. Crawford insisted that had he been with Williamson at the time, the massacre would not have happened. He said that not he alone, but all his friends and all good men, wherever they were, reprobated acts of that kind.

Winganund was unmoved. Those friends and good men, he said, had not prevented Williamson from going out again to kill the remainder of the inoffensive Moravians. He called them foolish because they had believed the whites in preference to the Indians. The Delaware had often told them that they would one day be treated in just this way by those who called themselves friends.

They had warned that there was no faith to be placed in what white men said, that their fair promises were only meant to allure the Indians so that they might be killed more easily. Crawford answered that when it became known that Williamson was determined to go out again, he had gone with him to prevent him from committing fresh murders. The chief doubted this. The Indians would not believe it, even if he told them so, because it would not have been in Crawford’s power to prevent Williamson from doing as he pleased.

“Out of my power? ” Crawford asked. “Have any Moravian Indians been killed or hurt since we came out? ”

“None,” Winganund conceded.

“But you went first to their town, and finding it empty and deserted, you turned on the path towards us. If you had been in search of warriors only, you would not have gone thither. Our spies watched you closely. They saw you while you were embodying yourselves on the other side of the Ohio.

They saw you cross that river. They saw where you encamped at night. They saw you turn off from the path to the deserted Moravian town. They knew you were going out of your way.

Your steps were constantly watched, and you were suffered quietly to proceed until you reached the spot where you were attacked. ”

Crawford then asked what they intended to do with him. Winganund told him plainly. Williamson and his whole cowardly host had run off in the night at the whistling of the warriors’ balls, satisfied that they no longer had Moravians to deal with but men who could fight, and with such men Williamson did not wish to have anything to do.

Since Williamson had escaped and Crawford had been taken, the Indians would take revenge on him in Williamson’s stead. Crawford asked if there was no possibility of preventing it, no way to get him off. He promised that his friend would be well rewarded if he could save his life. Winganund explained that had Williamson been taken with him, he and some friends might have succeeded in saving Crawford by making use of what Crawford had told them.

But as matters stood, no man would dare to interfere. The king of England himself, were he to come to that spot with all his wealth and treasures, could not affect the purpose. The blood of the innocent Moravians, more than half of them women and children, cruelly and wantonly murdered, called aloud for revenge. The relatives of the slain cried out and stood ready.

The nation to which they belonged would have revenge. The Shawnee had asked for Crawford’s fellow prisoner, and on him they would take revenge. All the nations connected with them cried out for revenge. The offense had become national, and the nation itself was bound to take revenge.

Crawford accepted his fate. “Then it seems my fate is decided and I must prepare to meet death in its worst form. ”

Winganund was sorry but could do nothing. Had Crawford attended to the Indian principle that a good man ought not to go into evil company, he would not be in this lamentable situation.

Williamson had deserted him, and now he could see what a bad man Williamson truly was. Nothing remained but for Crawford to meet his fate like a brave man. “Farewell, Colonel Crawford,” Winganund said. “They are coming.

”

The chief retired to a solitary spot to mourn in silence. According to those who were present, including Winganund himself, both men burst into tears at the close of the conversation and took an affectionate leave of each other before the chief hid himself in the bushes. Winganund never afterward spoke of Crawford’s fate without strong emotions of grief. Years later, on his first visit to Detroit after Crawford’s death, he heard himself censured in his own presence by gentlemen who said he should have saved the life of so valuable a man, and one who had been his particular friend.

He listened calmly, then turned to the missionary and said in his own language that these men talked like fools. Turning to the gentlemen, he replied in English that if King George himself had been on the spot with all his ships laden with goods and treasures, he could not have ransomed his friend nor saved his life from the rage of a justly exasperated multitude. The censure stung him. He had been Crawford’s friend, and various acts of sociability had passed between them.

But he was a Delaware Indian, a distinguished man among his nation, and the offense against his people had been national and unprovoked. He might have been expected to share in the desire for revenge. Instead, he had persevered in his attachment to Crawford, avowing that friendship in the face of his enraged countrymen, and seeking a solitary place to bewail the death of the man he still loved and was not ashamed to call his friend. It was impossible for friendship to be put to a more severe test, and Winganund’s example showed how deep a root that sentiment could take in the mind of an Indian, even when such circumstances failed to extinguish it.

Crawford met his death at the stake, and the friendship of a Delaware chief could not save him.