Spread of English-Speaking Peoples 119 



dotted clearings, there dwelt a group of peaceful 

 beings who were destined to suffer a dire fate in 

 the most lamentable and pitiable of all the tragedies 

 which were played out in the heart of this great 

 wilderness. These were the Moravian Indians. 27 

 They were mostly Delawares, and had been con- 

 verted by the indefatigable German missionaries, 

 who taught the tranquil, Quaker-like creed of Count 

 Zinzendorf. The zeal and success of the mission- 

 aries were attested by the marvelous change they had 

 wrought in these converts ; for they had transformed 

 them in one generation from a restless, idle, blood- 

 thirsty people of hunters and fishers, into an orderly, 

 thrifty, industrious folk, believing with all their 

 hearts the Christian religion in the form in which 

 their teachers both preached and practiced it. At 

 first the missionaries, surrounded by their Indian 

 converts, dwelt in Pennsylvania; but, harried and 

 oppressed by their white neighbors, the submissive 

 and patient Moravians left their homes and their 

 cherished belongings, and, in 1771, moved out into 

 the wilderness northwest of the Ohio. It is a bitter 

 and unanswerable commentary on the workings of 

 a non-resistant creed when reduced to practice, that 

 such outrages and massacres as those committed on 

 these helpless Indians were more numerous and 

 flagrant in the colony the Quakers governed than in 



21 The missionaries called themselves United Brethren ; to 

 outsiders they were known as Moravians. Loskiel, "History 

 of the Mission of the United Brethren," London, 1794. Hecke- 

 welder, "Narrative of the Mission of the United Brethren," 

 Phil., 1820. 



