64 Coal. — Gnadenhutten. 



leaves and charcoal, but from a vegetable source? Bitumen is 

 rarely if ever found, but petroleum is abundant in the West. Its 

 origin is plainly from vegetable decomposition, — the same source as 

 that of the carburetted hydrogen, namely, from the coal beds under 

 the valley of the Ohio. The vegetables forming these were de- 

 posited when the lime was in a plastic state, and filled with living 

 shells ; in the same manner petroleum is now daily discharging into 

 the soft mud and gravel, in the beds of the Little Muskingum and 

 Hews's River. It will be found by future geologists, when those 

 sands shall become consolidated into rock, lodged in cells formed by 

 the contained gases. That bituminous coal is not a mineral matter, 

 is evident from the fact that it is not found in primitive rocks ; prob- 

 ably because, that at the period of the formation of the deeper pri- 

 mary rocks, no vegetable productions were in existence ; for the 

 relics of none are found until near the period of the transition or 

 secondary rocks, unless we ascribe the plumbago to a vegetable ori- 

 gin, in which case the first plants will have been coeval with the 

 earliest slaty rocks. 



Gnadenhutten. — Gnadenhutten, or "Tents of Grace," the scene 

 of the missionary labors of the pious and humane Heckewelder, is 

 seated on the river, twenty five miles belpw Zoar. The ancient In- 

 dian village was placed on a broad elevated plain, on the east side of 

 the stream. These simple sons of the forest had become docile 

 as children, under the gentle guidance of the Moravian teachers: a 

 large number of them were truly pious, and members of the church 

 of Christ. Seated on the frontiers between the contending savages 

 and the whites, and taking sides with neither, they had become ob- 

 noxious to both, and were cruelly murdered in cold blood, to the 

 number of ninety four, in April, 1782, by Col.'s Williamson and 

 Crawford, and party — the Sandusky Indians, accusing them of be- 

 ing friendly to the whites, and the whites charging them with secre- 

 ting the stolen property brought by the war parties on their return 

 from the settlements. How often the fate of these poor Indians is 

 verified in modern warfare ; the quiet and unoffending neutral is 

 plundered and abused by both the belligerent parties. Filled with 

 the spirit of revenge, in the month of March, 1782, a party of eighty 

 or ninety mounted men, under the guidance of Col.'s Williamson 

 and Crawford, took their departure from the " Old Mingo Bottoms," 

 the well known rallying ground of border warfare, destined for the 

 Moravian villages on the Tuscarawas. The Indians, thinking of no 



