The Ely miner. [volume] (Ely, Minn.) 1895-1986, 1932-08-12


and New England speed horsemen,
and sleeping village and farm
- - house awaken to listen wonder
ingly to the cry that rings through
= -. & the night: "Cornwallis is taken!
Ir]RAN CORVALLIS is taken." So the six
IGSxASQ year struggle for freedom is end
So ed and George Washington and
his ragged COntinentals have tri-
umphed at last! The Revolution is overt
Such is the picture which the school histories
have painted in our minds. But the impression
they have given US that the surrender at York
town meant the dawn of peace and the prosper
Gus beginning of a nation is only a half
truth. True it is that 1871 was the last year
of the Revolution in the main theater of war
the Atlantic seaboard But there was one peo-
pie in the new nation who were to know an
other year of the horrors of war such as their
eastern neighbors had never known.
To the scattered border settlements west of
the Alleghenies there had not yet come
winged Victory with smooth brow laurelled to
teach US to forget the holocaust" Instead, the
year 1882 was to be a repetition Of 1777, the
'year of the bloody sevens," and again, virtually
deserted by those governments to whom they
had a right to look for aid, the pioneers in the
Ohio valley, especially those in Kentucky, must
crouch behind the log walls Of their stockaded
forts with the savage war-whoop ringing in
their ears and a shower of Indian arrows and
bullets whistling over their heads. So in its
sesqu-centennal year, we Americans should
not forget what these ancestors Of ours who
won the West for us suffered and endured in
1852, the last year of the Revolution.
1t opened with affair which must ever be
a blot on our history. Ten years before, David
Zeisberger and John Heckewelder, Moravian
missionaries, had founded three settlements,
Salem, Gnadenhuetten and Schonbrunn on the
Tuscarawas river in Ohio for the Delaware In
dams who had embraced Christianity During
the Revolution these "Moravian Indians tried
hard to maintain a strict neutrality but this
altitude won them friends neither side. The
British charged them with aiding the Ameri-
cans and it is true that they did aid them by
ransoming captives from hostile Indians and by
warning the officers at Pittsburgh of impend-
ing Indian attacks. But as time went on the
Americans also began to suspect the "Moravan
Indians" of being pro-British The hostile In
dams used the Moravian towns as convenient
halfway houses" when starting on or return
ing from a foray against the Kentucky Penn
sylvania settlements and there they got shelter
and refreshment which the "Moravian Indians
dared not refuse them.
Finally party of Pennsylvanians, led by the
notorious Col. David Williamson, set out with
the avowed intention of wiping out the Mora
Wan towns. They arrived at Gnadenhuetten on
March Z, 1852, and gathered the unsuspect1ng
Indians in two houses, the men in one and the
women and children in the other Then they
told the Indians that they were to be put to
death.
The next morning the butchery began. Will
liamsons men entered the cabins and cold
bloodedly put to death the 90 defenseess men,
women and children-only small boy escap-
ing the massacre. "More than hundred years
have passed since this deed of revolving brutal
fly; but even now just mans blood boils in
his veins at the remembrance writes Theodore
Roosevelt in The Winning OF the West" 1T is
impossible not TO regret that fate failed to send
some strong party of savages across the
paths of these inhuman towards to infict on
them the punishment they richly deserved.
We know that a few of them were afterwards
killed by the Indians; it is matter of keen
regret that any escaped
But, as often happened in the history of
our Indian warfare, retribution for this dark
deed fell not upon the guilty but upon the inno-
cent. Wild with rage over the slaughter of their
brethren, the Delawares rallied to their aid the
wyandots and other Indians allied with the
British and waited for a good chance for re
venge which soon came. In May a body of $50
Pennsylvania and Virginia militia gathered at
Mingo Bottom on the Ohio and prepared to
march against the wyandot and Shawnee towns
on the Upper Sandusky