In the spring of 1781, Colonel Daniel Brodhead, commanding the western division of the American army, set out to strike a decisive blow against the hostile Indian towns along the Muskingum River. An expedition of about eight hundred men, many of them the most experienced Indian hunters on the Virginia and Pennsylvania frontier, rendezvoused at Wheeling and moved rapidly toward their objective, hoping to catch the enemy before word of their approach could spread. When the army reached the river a little below Salem, the lowest of the Moravian towns, Brodhead sent word to the missionary there, the Reverend John Heckewelder, requesting provisions and a meeting. The Christian Indians sent supplies, and Heckewelder came to camp.
Brodhead assured him that nothing would give him greater pain than to hear that any of the Moravian Indians had been molested, since they had conducted themselves honorably throughout the war. But even as he spoke, an officer rode up with alarming news: a division of the militia was preparing to break off and destroy the Moravian settlements up the river. Brodhead and Colonel David Shepherd of Wheeling took measures to prevent it, and the army continued on. Within a few miles of Coshocton, the troops captured an Indian prisoner.
Soon after, two more Indians were spotted and fired upon, but both escaped, one wounded. Knowing they would race ahead to warn the town, Brodhead ordered a rapid march through a heavy rain. The plan succeeded. The army arrived in three divisions, surrounding the town, and captured the whole number of Indians on the east side of the river without firing a single shot.
But the river, swollen from the rain, could not be crossed, and the villages on the west side escaped destruction. Among the prisoners, a friendly Delaware chief named Pekelon pointed out sixteen warriors. A council of war that evening doomed them to death. They were bound, taken a little below the town, dispatched with tomahawks and spears, and scalped.
The next morning, an Indian appeared on the opposite bank and asked for the big captain. When Brodhead came forward, the Indian said he wanted peace. Brodhead told him to send over some chiefs. When the Indian asked if they would be killed, Brodhead assured him they would not.
One chief crossed the river and entered into conversation with Brodhead in the streets. But as they spoke, a man named John Wetzel approached from behind with a tomahawk concealed in his hunting shirt and struck him on the back of the head. The chief fell dead on the spot. Around midday, the army began its retreat with about twenty prisoners in the care of the militia.
After marching about a mile, the men commenced killing them and did not stop until the whole number had been murdered and scalped. Only a few women and children were spared and taken to Fort Pitt. A year later, the frontier was still burning. A few months after Cornwallis surrendered at Yorktown, settlers along the Ohio continued to suffer Indian depredations.
They had endured six years of total war, and before that the outrages of Lord Dunmore’s War, Pontiac’s War, and the French and Indian War. Tensions ran high, and many settlers thirsted for revenge. In Ohio lived the peaceful Moravian Christian Indians, converted by missionaries like John Heckewelder. They were at war with no one.
Their Delaware, Wyandot, and Shawnee kinsmen regarded them as foolish traitors for giving up the customs of their race, while white settlers suspected them of harboring and supplying the hostile Indians before their raids. Their towns lay directly on the track from Sandusky to the Ohio, and passing war parties would compel them to furnish provisions. Caught between two fires, they had remained neutral throughout the Revolutionary War, and when they did take part, it was in favor of the whites, warning them of approaching danger. But early in February 1782, a party of Indians from Sandusky penetrated the settlements and committed numerous depredations.
Among the families struck was that of David Wallace, his wife, six children, and a man named Carpenter. All were killed except Carpenter, who was taken prisoner. The early date of the attack convinced the settlers that the raiders had wintered with the Moravians, and vengeance was vowed against those believed to have harbored them. An expedition was quickly organized.
Around the first of March, a body of eighty or ninety men, chiefly from the Monongahela, rendezvoused at the old Mingo towns on Mingo bottom. Each man furnished his own arms, ammunition, and provisions. The second day brought them within a mile of the middle Moravian town, where they encamped for the night. In the morning, the men divided into two parties.
One was to cross the river about a mile above the town, where scouts had reported Indians on both sides. The other was split into three divisions to approach the east side from the woods, the lower end, and the upper end of the town. The Moravians received warning of the danger but took no measures to escape. They believed they had nothing to fear from the Americans, thinking the only quarter from which they had grounds for injury was from Indians who were enemies to the Americans.
When the party meant to attack the west side reached the river, they found no craft to cross. A young man named Slaughter swam the river and brought back not a canoe but a trough meant for holding sugar water, which could carry only two men at a time. To speed the crossing, men stripped off their clothes, placed them in the trough with their guns, and swam alongside, holding its edges. When about sixteen men had crossed, their sentinels discovered and shot an Indian named Shabosh.
Fearing the gunfire would alert the town, they sent word for the east-side party to move at once. The small party marched with all speed to the main town on the west side, where a large company of Indians was gathering corn left in the fields the previous fall. The men professed peace and goodwill, telling the Moravians they had come to take them to Fort Pitt for their safety. The Indians surrendered, delivering up their arms and even their hatchets, on the promise that everything would be restored to them upon arrival at Pittsburgh.
The murderers then went to Salem and persuaded the Indians there to go with them to Gnadenhutten, where the inhabitants had already been seized and bound without resistance. When those from Salem entered the town, they too were disarmed and bound. With the prisoners secured, a council of war was held. The officers, unwilling to take full responsibility for the awful decision, agreed to put the question to the whole body of men.
They were drawn up in a line, and the commander, Colonel David Williamson, asked whether the Moravian Indians should be taken prisoner to Pittsburgh or put to death. He requested that all who favored saving their lives step out and form a second rank. Sixteen, some say eighteen, stepped forward. But the line of mercy was far too short for that of vengeance.
Those opposed protested in the name of high heaven, calling God to witness that they were innocent of the blood of these inoffensive people. Some were even in favor of burning the prisoners alive, but it was finally decided they should be scalped in cold blood. The Indians were told to prepare for their fates, that as Christians they might die in a Christian manner. After the first burst of horror passed, they suffered themselves to be led into buildings, men in one, women and children in another, like sheep for slaughter.
They passed the night in prayer, exhorting each other to remain faithful, asking pardon for offenses committed, and singing hymns of praise. In the morning, the murderers selected two houses as slaughterhouses, one for the men, one for the women and children. The victims were bound two and two and led inside, where they were scalped and murdered. The number of the slain, as reported by the men on their return, was eighty-seven or eighty-nine, but the Moravian accounts, which are no doubt correct, make the number ninety-six.
Of these, sixty-two were grown persons, a third of them women. The remaining thirty-four were children. Only two of the Indians at Gnadenhutten and Salem escaped. One was a lad of fourteen or fifteen who slipped through a window the night before and hid in the cellar of the house where the women and children were brought the next day to be murdered, whose blood he saw running in streams through the floor.
The other youth received a blow on the head and was left for dead. The Indians of the upper town were warned in time to flee, having found the mangled body of Shabosh. A division was ordered to Schoenbrunn, but finding the place deserted, they took what plunder they could find and returned. After the work of death was finished and the plunder secured, all the buildings in town were set on fire, including the slaughterhouses, and the party made a rapid retreat to the settlements.
It was one of the most horrible affairs ever undertaken in the country, a record of infamy. Doddridge, whose account preserves part of the story, said of Williamson that he was a brave man but not cruel, one who would meet an enemy in battle and fight like a soldier but not murder a prisoner. Had he held the authority of a superior officer, Doddridge believed, not a single Moravian Indian would have lost his life. But he was only a militia officer who could advise, not command, and his only fault was too easy a compliance with popular opinion.
Those who committed the deed were not miscreants or vagabonds. Many were men of standing who had recently lost relations to Indians and were burning for revenge, caring little upon whom they wreaked it so long as they were Indians. The Moravians never fired a shot. They were prisoners promised protection.
Their villages had been removed to Sandusky the fall before, ending the complaint that they were halfway houses for warriors. It was an atrocious and unqualified murder. Very few imbrued their hands in the blood of the Moravians. Even some who had not voted for saving their lives retired from the scene with horror.
They thought well but lacked the heroism to say so. Those like Edward Christy, who joined the raid after Indians killed his fiancée, and Obadiah Holmes Jr. , who rescued an Indian boy and adopted him until adulthood, stood against the killing.
They deserved honorable mention for their intrepidity.
