USA > Pennsylvania > Northampton County > History of Northampton County [Pennsylvania] and the grand valley of the Lehigh, Volume I > Part 16
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In another place, about fourteen miles distant from Stenton's, another outrage was committed, of which the following account is given in Loskiel's "History of the Missions of the Indians in America":
In August, 1763, Zachary and his wife, who had left the congregation in Wechquetank (where they had belonged, but left some time previous), came on a visit, and did all in their power to disquiet the minds of the brethren respecting the intentions of the white people. A woman called Zippora was persuaded to follow them. On their return they stayed at the Buchkabuchka (Lehigh Gap) over night, where Captain Wetterholt lay with a company of soldiers and went unconcerned to sleep in a hayloft. But in the night they were surprised by the soldiers. Zippora was thrown down upon the threshing-floor and killed; Zachary escaped out of the house, but was pursued, and with his wife and little child, put to the sword, although the mother begged for their lives upon her knees.
These were friendly Indians, who were on their way from Shamokin to Bethlehem. Jacob Warner, a soldier in Nicholaus Wetterholt's company, made the following statement, September 9th: That he and Dodge were searching for a lost gun, when, about two miles above Fort Allen (Weiss- port), they saw three Indians painted black. Dodge fired upon them and killed one; Warner also fired upon them, and thought he wounded another ; but two escaped; and on the 24th, Dodge sent Warner with the scalp to a person in Philadelphia, who gave him eight dollars for it. These were also friendly Indians.
On the 7th of October Captain Jacob Wetterholt, with a few soldiers from Bethlehem, were on their way to Fort Allen. They arrived in the evening and lodged at the house of John Stenton, who kept a store and tavern in the then Irish settlement about a mile north of Howertown in Allen township, Northampton county, on the road leading from Weaversville to Kreidersville, near where the High Tension Power Line crosses the road on the farm known for many years as the Baer home, now owned by George Laubach. This house the Indians burned with revenge on account of injuries received there.
At daybreak on Saturday morning, October 8, 1763, as the Indians were making their way stealthily towards Stenton's tavern, they met Mrs. James Horner, who was on her way to a neighboring house "to borrow fire," and tomahawked her. Her husband later found the body and carried it to the settlement meeting-house (Presbyterian), where he sat alone with the corpse of his wife the whole night. The following day her body was interred in the adjoining cemetery. A tombstone containing the following epitaph marks the resting-place of her ashes:
In memory of Jane, wife of James Horner, who suffered death by the hands of the savage Indians, October Eighth,
Seventeen Hundred and Sixty-three, aged fifty years.
The Indians approached the house, which was unguarded, unperceived and undiscovered during the night, and when the door was opened before day on the morning of the memorable 8th of October by the servant of Captain Wetterholt, he was shot at and instantly killed. Captain Wetterholt and Sergeant McGuire were also shot at and dangerously wounded. John
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Stenton was shot dead. The wounded were taken to Bethlehem, where Captain Wetterholt died the next day.
A detailed account of the different murders was sent by Timothy Hors- field, by a messenger, to the governor of Philadelphia. It was published in the Pennsylvania Gazette of October 13, 1763, printed by Benjamin Franklin :
On Sunday night last an express arrived from Northampton county, with the following melancholy account, viz :- That on Saturday morning, the 8th inst., the house of John Stenton, about eight miles from Bethlehem, was attacked by Indians, as follows: Captain Wetterholt with a party belonging to Fort Allen, being at that house, and intending to set out early for the fort, ordered a servant to get his horse ready, who was immediately shot down by the enemy; upon which the Captain, going to the door, was also fired at, and mortally wounded; that then a sergeant attempted to pull in the Captain and to shut the door, but he was likewise dangerously wounded ; that the Lieutenant next advanced, when an Indian jumped upon the bodies of the two others and presented a pistol to his breast, which he put a little aside, and it went off over his shoulder, whereby he got the Indian out of the house and shut the door; that the Indians after this went round to a window, and as Stenton was getting out of bed shot him, but not dead, and he, breaking out of the house, ran about a mile, when he dropped and died ; that his wife and two children ran down into the cellar, where they were shot at three times, but escaped; that Captain Wetterholt, finding himself growing very weak, crawled to a window, and shot an Indian dead, it was thought, as he was in the act of setting fire to the house with a match, and that upon this the other Indians carried him away with them and went off. Captain Wetterholt died soon after.
After the deplorable disaster at Stenton's house, the Indians plundered James Allen's house, a short distance, after which they attacked Andrew Hazlet's house half a mile from Allen's, where they shot and scalped a man. Hazlet attempted to fire on the Indians, but missed, and he was shot himself, which his wife, some distance off, saw. She ran off with two children, but was pursued and overtaken by the Indians, who caught and tomahawked her and the children in a dreadful manner; yet she and one of the children lived until four days after, and the other child recovered. Hazlet's house was plundered. About a quarter of a mile from there the Indians burned down Kratzer's house, probably after having plundered it. Among the papers of Jacob Fatzinger of Weaversville, the following note was found: "Memo- randum June 15th, 1880. Philip Kratzer's farm was purchased by Jacob Lindaman, father of George Lindaman, of Allen township, now in his 79th year, who says that Kratzer had stolen a deer from the Indians, who sought revenge by burning his house and barn, and that they would undoubtedly have murdered the family had they not been seen approaching the place from the neighboring hill; that Kratzer took the title deed and papers of value and deposited them under a fallen tree some distance from the house near a division line between his property and the land owned by Daniel Swartz, and that he mounted a horse and escaped; that Mrs. Hazlet, with two children and a dog, hid herself under a brush-heap in the meadow on the lands now owned by Charles Fogleman. Then a party of Indians pro- ceeded to a place on the Lehigh, a short distance above Siegfried's bridge, often referred to as 'Indian Falls' or 'Indian Rapids,' where twelve Indians were seen wading across the river by Ulrich Showalter, who was at that
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time working on the roof of a building. The site of which being considerably elevated above the River Lehigh, he had a good opportunity to count them. It is not known that they were seen by any one but Showalter until they reached the farm of John Jacob Mickley, where they encountered three of his children, two boys and a girl, in a field under a chestnut tree, gathering chestnuts. The children's ages were: Peter, eleven; Henry, nine; and Bar- bary, seven; who, on seeing the Indians, began to run away. The little girl was overtaken not far from the tree by an Indian, who knocked her down with a tomahawk. Henry had reached the fence, and, while in the act of climbing it, an Indian threw a tomahawk at his back which, it is supposed, instantly killed him. Both of these children were scalped. The little girl, in an insensible state, lived until the following morning. Peter, having reached the woods, hid himself between two large trees which were standing near together, and, surrounded by brushwood, he remained quietly concealed there until he was sure that the Indians had left. When he heard the screams of the Schneider family he knew that the Indians were at that place. He ran with all his might, by way of Adam Deshler's, to his brother, John Jacob Mickley, to whom he communicated the melancholy intelligence. He often said that the Mickley family owned at that time a very large and ferocious dog, which had a particular antipathy to Indians, and it was believed by the family that it was owing to the dog the Indians did not make, an attack on their house. John Jacob Mickley and Ulrich Flickinger, then on their way to Stenton's, being attracted by the screams of the Schneiders, hastened to the place and found the horribly mangled bodies of the dead and wounded, and the houses of Marks and Schneider in flames. The dead were buried on Schneider's farm."
The Mickley and Schneider families suffered innocently. Heckwelder says: "The Indians, after leaving this house (Stenton's), murdered by acci- dent an innocent family, having mistaken the house they meant to attack, after which they returned to their homes." It is said that they had intended to massacre the Paul Balliet family.
Refugees from Allen, Lehigh and neighboring townships crowded the Crown Inn at Bethlehem, which stood on the site of the railway station at South Bethlehem. The inhabitants of the Saucon valley, when they heard of the massacre, became panic-stricken and also crowded into the Crown Inn. It was late in December before the last of the fugitives returned to their homes.
The Indians finally withdrew from the interior of the white settlements into the wilds of the Susquehanna country. The government, conscious they could no longer protect any Indians, requested them to retire to the back country. The Conestogas settled at Wyalusing, a hundred miles from the frontier settlers. The other Indians of the same clans living at the Forks of the Delaware migrated still further northward and westward. Here they lived quietly, built good houses, planted fruit trees and cultivated the land. While enjoying these favorable prospects of quietness and happiness they were notified that the Six Nations had sold their entire country to the English. Then they in 1768 determined again to migrate westward. The Minisinks went to the Allegheny river; the Turtle and Turkey tribes, along
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with the Christian Indians, to Muskingum (now Tuscarawas) in the present State of Ohio; the whole country east of the Allegheny Mountains was then free from Indians. The Revolutionary War depleted their ranks, and the murder of the Christian Indians on the Muskingum in 1782 completed their alienation from the whites; those who remained were driven to despair and finally dispersed. The Minisinks finally settled permanently in Canada, affiliating with the struggling remnants of other tribes, and lost their individ- uality as a tribe. The Turkey and Turtle tribes were again compelled to migrate from Ohio to Indiana, and then again to the Mississippi river, then on to Missouri, thence to Kansas, and in 1866 they were forced to Oklahoma.
The sun has set upon the red man; the last sad relics of the aboriginal tribes who once owned all this vast continent as their hunting grounds have been practically swallowed up in the swift civilization of the paleface.
CHAPTER XIII BATTLE AND MASSACRE OF WYOMING
The Wyoming Valley at the outbreak of the Revolution was blessed with peace and prosperity. Its people realized the condition of those in the fanciful "Happy Valley" of Rasselas. The intense patriotism of the settlers had caused the expulsion of some forty of their number, mostly of German and Scotch-Irish descent, from their midst on account of their Toryism. This had aroused a great enmity among the Tories, and incurred the most active and implacable animosity of the individuals cast out. Therefore there was a great storm gathering in the north that was to bring devastation and ruin on the peaceful valley that was basking in sunshine.
The defeat of Burgoyne at Saratoga released the Indian allies of the British, and their war-roused passion was wreaked on the defenceless border settlements. Sir William Johnson was dead; but the great captain of the Six Nations was Joseph Brant, a brother of Molly Brant, a mistress of Sir William. Therefore the old-time influence of the English representative of Indian affairs was continued through his son and nephew and Molly Brant.
In the summer of 1778 the signs of danger increased at Wyoming ; wives besought their husbands to return from the army, and the people clamored for protection to the Continental Congress and the Pennsylvania authorities, but no effective measures were taken for their aid. Finally a number of the officers resigned from the army and a score of privates deserted to hurry home to protect their threatened families. By common consent Colonel Zebulon Butler was made commander of these hastily gathered forces. There was not only lack of men but ammunition, and the women were set to work to undertake the manufacture of this needed commodity by utilizing the saltpetre obtained from the soil, blending this with prepared charcoal to form powder and casting in moulds, bullets and rifle balls.
The Indians and British forces were concentrated at Tioga towards the close of Junc, 1778. The army totaled 1,200 fighting men, and was divided into three elements. First there were 400 British provincials, consisting of Colonel John Butler's Rangers and Sir John Johnson's Royal Greens, in smart uniforms, those of Butler's Rangers being a rich green. There was also a rabble of Tories from New York, New Jersey and Pennsylvania, who were garbed in every form of backwoods rusticity, tattered and torn. There were not less than 700 Indians, chiefly Senecas, with detachments from the Mohawks and other tribes; they were half-naked, or in savage attire, with their war-paint and barbarous adornment. With them was a band of squaws -if possible, more bloodthirsty than their masters.
If the rank and file and rabble were of a nondescript character, the per- sonality of its commanders offered contrasts as strange and startling and incongruous. The expedition was under the command of Colonel John But- ler, known by the sobriquet of "Indian Butler." He was a descendant of an ancient Anglo-Irish family that traced their genealogy to the dukes of
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Normandy before the Conquest, of which the great Duke of Ormond (1610-88) was a member.' Indian Butler was the ablest and certainly the most atrocious Tory leader of the period; fat and squat of figure, with a round and rough visage, he did not present the appearance of an ideal leader nor a man of prepossessing personality. He figured as the commander of a motley band of marauding whites and Indians in 1776, and was at their head at the battle of Oriskany. The Indian chief was Joseph Brant, the great Mohawk chieftain, the virtual head of the Six Nations. This semi-civilized brother of Sir William Johnson's mistress was at this time in his prime of manhood, being thirty-six years of age. He did not descend the river, but was instru- mental in assembling the Indians for the expedition at Tioga Point. In strange contrast to the dignified and able savage Brant and the degenerate scion of nobility Indian Butler, was a third person of sinister and subtle influ- ence in this strangely mixed mass of harsh humanity. This was a woman, the redoubtable eccentric enthusiast "Queen Esther." Her real name was Catharine Montour, a half-breed, the reputed daughter of one of the French governors of Canada. She had received a liberal education, possessed refine- ment, and had been petted and feted as a romantic and engaging young woman by the best society of colonial Philadelphia, Albany and New York. Queen Esther was the widow of a chief and enjoyed the repute of being a seeress. This gave her strange power over the people of her race, and the recent loss of a son made her a veritable fury who swayed her followers into the utmost extravagances of fanaticism.
This wild aggregation of soldiers, Indians, renegade whites, who had been brutalized by three years of fierce frontier warfare, descended the Sus- quehanna river to a point a score of miles above the Wyoming settlement. Their approach was observed by a solitary Wyoming scout who, from his lofty mountain station, watched every movement of the approaching enemy. The frontiersmen at Wyoming were fully aware of the superior force of the enemy, and had only vague hopes of the arrival of reinforcements, but the idea of flight never occurred to them. Their forces numbered about 300 men, nearly all of whom were undisciplined. Of the 230 enrolled men, many were minors, and the remaining seventy were either boys or old men. They were divided into six companies, and were mustered at Forty Fort, on the west side of the river, while the families of the settlers were in refuge on the east side. The officers of the little force under Colonel Butler were Colonels John Durkee, Nathan Dennison, Lieutenant-Colonel George Dor- rance, Major John Garrett, Captains Dethic Hewitt, Asaph Whittlesey, Lazarus Stewart, James Bidlack, Jr., Rezin Geer and Aholiab Buck. There were other officers engaged in the battle, namely : Captains Samuel Ransom, Robert Durkee and William McKarrican.
Such was the situation of affairs on July 3, 1778, when the British and Indians advanced deliberately down the valley. In their march they had destroyed everything in their way; Jenkins' Fort had capitulated, a score of murders had been perpetrated, and Wintermoot's, which had been built by the Tories to aid the British and Indians, opened its gates to the invading party. The little army of the settlers, though their foe outnumbered them four to one, in the middle of the afternoon marched up the valley, the river
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being on their right, with drums beating, colors flying and in true .military array. On the approach of the enemy the column deployed to the left and formed in line of battle, with its right wing on the high bank of the river and its left extending across the plain to a swamp. Colonel Butler, as the enemy advanced, gave the order to fire, and a volley rang out along the entire line with precision and some effect. The British flinched but only for a moment, and pressed forward again. The brave Butler then attempted the almost impossible feat of moving his thin line forward against the over- whelming force that faced it. But this was all in vain, for as the line advanced the Indians slipped singly and by dozens into the brush of the swamp and flanked the left wing of the Americans. The little band of Wyoming men became confused though they did not retreat, and the Indians, seizing the opportunity, rushed forward with their frightful whoops and tomahawked right and left those who had not been previously killed in the battle. The little band melted like wax before a fire. The Indians pressed the survivors towards the river, along the banks of which wives and mothers of the brave fighters had crowded in agonized watchfulness. Some of the settlers swam the river and escaped, others were tomahawked in the water or shot from the shore. A few, promised quarter, returned, but were treacherously struck down as they climbed the bank.
Massacre began when the battle terminated ; one hundred and sixty had been killed, and the balance was soon captured. Every species of torture to the captives was indulged in by the Indians. Captain Bidlack was thrown alive on blazing logs, pinned down with pitchforks, and held in spite of his powerful paroxysms until death relieved him. William Mason, a boy captain, was similarly slain. A debauch of blood followed for the especial delectation of Queen Esther ; a score of prisoners were brought before her for torture and assembled around a great boulder. They were bound and compelled to kneel about the rock, and then this Hecate seized a tomahawk and, raising a wild song, swept swiftly around the circle, dashing out the brains of sixteen victims, while the warriors crowded close about the scene of butchery, leap- ing and yelling, expressing their fierce joy. The four that escaped the sacrifice were pursued by fleet-footed Indians and quickly despatched.
Night came on, but still the insatiate savages built fires, stripped the remaining prisoners naked, drove them back and forth through the flames, finally thrusting them on the embers with their spears until they fell from exhaustion, and all were despatched.
In the battle and massacre three hundred men were killed, and that day in the valley made one hundred and fifty widows and nearly six hundred orphans. While the massacre was in progress, the flight of the survivors commenced; the Indians, however, divided into small bands, passed up and down the valley, burning every building and slaughtering all the inhabitants they found, except some children, whom they took into captivity. Finally they rendezvoused and withdrew to the northward, a swarming, triumphant body, the squaws bringing up the rear on stolen horses, their bridle-reins hanging heavy with strings of sodden scalps. Desolation reigned supreme throughout the valley. There were only the charred ruins of cabins and the unburied dead lying stark naked under the serene sky and pitiless sun of the NORTH .- 1-9.
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4th of July, 1778, where had so lately been happy homes and thronging, varied and busy human life.
The wild flight of the survivors streamed through the wilderness to the Delaware and Lehigh settlements, chiefly to the safety afforded by Fort Penn, located where Stroudsburg now stands. This place of refuge was sixty miles distant, over mountains and through almost impregnable swamps, in a region absolutely uninhabited. Women, more than men, made up the throng, and in one band of nearly one hundred women and children, there was but a solitary man to advise or aid them. They were without food, many scarcely clothed, but they pressed on, weak, trembling, and growing constantly worse from their unaccustomed labor through the thickets, mire and ooze. One by one the weakest gave out; some wandered from the path and became lost; some fell from exhaustion, some from wounds incurred in the battle, but the majority maintained life in some miraculous way and pressed on. Children were born and children died in the fearful, forced march. Finally the refugees, half-famished, reached Fort Penn and the towns of the good Moravians. They were given food, and those who needed it, tender care until they could go to their old homes or find new ones.
The far-reaching results of the massacre soon became self-evident. Wyoming had won the heart of the world for the struggling colonies of America, against whom the mother country had armed and arrayed savages who could perform such atrocities. The massacre had struck confusion into the camp of the Tories in England, who had to endure the odium of employ- ing Indians in subduing rebellion, and finally when men had gone far enough from the event to see clearly its meaning, they read that what had seemed at first an unmitigated disaster was in reality a disguised victory, and that Wyoming must take rank with Lexington, Concord and Bunker Hill in effect upon the long fight for freedom. The victims who fell in the valley before British muskets in Indian hands were really the marked martyrs of the Revolution, and the blood of the Revolution and the blood of the martyrs was the seed of independence and of the republic. The bodies of the mur- dered men of Wyoming remained where they had fallen, a prey for wolves nearly four months, when on October 22d a military guard repaired there, collected and buried them in one huge grave. The blood of the martyrs called aloud for retribution, and slowly but surely preparations were made to shatter the whole system of the hostile Indian alliance in New York. To avenge this great wrong, General John Sullivan, one of the best soldiers and most picturesque personages of the Revolution, was selected to chastise and humble the Six Nations, and most effectually he performed the duty.
FLAG OF THE THIRTEEN COLONIES
VIEW UP THE LEHIGH SHOWING CHAIN DAM AND ISLAND PARK
CHAPTER XIV
THE REVOLUTIONARY PERIOD
The end of the Indian troubles found Northampton county in a prosper- ous and flourishing condition. For a decade peace reigned throughout the land, settlements gradually increased her prosperity and population, and re- moved as Northampton county was from the more populous communities of the colonies, the rumors of the troubles then brewing with the mother country did not disturb the even tenor of the ways and customs of her people. The discontent which arose at the passage of the Stamp Act, the forced importation of tea, and the growlings of the incipient rebellion occa -: sioned by the Boston Massacre, were at such a distance from her boundaries that only the rumblings and threatening aspect of affairs caused the people of Northampton county any uneasiness. When the cry of liberty and free- dom fired the inhabitants of the province of Pennsylvania, Northampton proved no exception in expressing her loyalty and devotion to the American cause. Easton, the shiretown of the county, was a village of about eighty houses, mostly log buildings. There were no bridges over the Delaware and Lehigh rivers, the roads few and poor, the streets not graded or paved, and the population did not exceed five hundred.
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