It was in the very heart of the Western wilderness, but the land was
rich and the savages friendly, and in a few years the teachers and their
followers had founded a fairer and happier home than they had known
before, and had begun to spread their light around them. The Indians
came from far and near to see their fields and orchards and gardens,
with the houses in the midst of them, built of squared logs and set on
streets branching to the four quarters from the chapel, which was the
peaceful citadel of each little town. It must have seemed a stately
edifice to their savage eyes, with its shingled roof, and its belfry,
where, ten years before any white man had settled beyond the Ohio,
the bell called the Christian Indians to prayer. No doubt the creature
comforts of the Christians had their charm, too, for the hungry pagans.
They were not used elsewhere to the hospitality that could set before
them such repasts as one of the missionaries tells us were spread for
the guest at Gnadenhutten. A table furnished with “good bread, meat,
butter, cheese, milk, tea and coffee, and chocolate,” and such fruits and
vegetables as the season afforded could hardly have been less wonderful
in the Indian’s eyes than red men with their hair cut, and without paint
or feathers, at work in the fields like squaws.
Their heathen neighbors began to come into the Moravians’ peaceful
fold, and the three villages grew and flourished till the war broke out
between the colonies and Great Britain. Then the troubles and sorrows
of the Moravians, white and red, began again. They were too weak to keep
the savage war parties from passing through their towns, and they dared
not refuse them rest and food. The warriors began to come with the first
leaves of spring, and they came and went till the first snows of autumn
made their trail too plain for them to escape pursuit from the border.
The Moravians did what they could to ransom their captives and to save
them from torture when the warriors returned after their raids, but all
their goodness did not avail them against the suspicion of the settlers.
The backwoodsmen looked on them as the spies and allies of the
savages, and the savages on their side believed them in league with the
Americans.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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