He kept his word, and in the Spring of 1772 the heroic man could have been seen floating down the Beaver and Ohio rivers with two whole villages of Christian Indians, seeking a new home in the Black Forest on the Upper Muskingum. Here they founded three settlements in all, Schönbrunn (Beautiful Spring), Lichtenau (Meadow of Light), Gnadenhütten (Tents of Grace), where the fabled wanderer is made by the poet to extend his search for Evangeline. Here the Moravian missionaries, Zeisberger and his noble assistant, Heckewelder, spent five marvellously successful years, in what is known as the first settlements of whites in the present State of Ohio, excepting such French as had lived in the Lake region. The settlements were governed by a complete set of published laws, and in many respects the experiment was an ideality fully achieved. The good influence of the orderly and devout colony spread throughout the Central West at a time when every influence was bad and growing rapidly worse. For five or six years Zeisberger here saw the richest fruit of his life; here also he was doomed to see what was undoubtedly the most disgraceful and dastardly crime ever committed in the name of freedom on this continent. [Illustration: JOHN HECKEWELDER _Missionary to the Indians_] The Revolutionary War now broke out, as if to despoil wantonly this aged hero's last and happiest triumph. The Moravians determined upon the impossible role of neutrality, with their settlements just beside the hard, wide war-path which ran between Fort Pitt and Fort Detroit; these were the strongholds, respectively, of the Americans and the British, who were quarrelling bitterly for the allegiance of the savages in the Black Forest between them. The policy was wholly disastrous. For some time the Christian Indians, because the influence of the past few years had been so uplifting, escaped unharmed. But as the conflict grew, bitter suspicion arose among both the Americans in Western Pennsylvania and the British at Sandusky and Detroit.