of the missions. For this purpose, Heckewelder will be our principal authority.

Three years after the settlement of New Salem, in the winter of 1789-90, the Ohio Indians joined a league of the Western savages against the United States, and it was determined at a general council to remove the Christian Indians and their teachers from Petquotting to Kegeyunk, now Fort Wayne, and that the former should then be required to take part in the impending hostilities. Information of this plot was secretly communicated to Zeisberger by some friendly Indians, and the missionary Edwards was instantly despatched to Detroit, with a request that the British commandant would grant them an asylum. He readily consented, and in April, 1790, a vessel arrived at the Huron River, and the whole Indian congregation abandoned their settlement of New Salem. They were at length. removed to the river Thames, seventy miles northeast of Detroit, where a town was built and called Fairfield.

In 1797, three separate tracts of four thousand acres each, including the sites of Gnadehutten, Schoenbrun and Salem were surveyed and laid off to the mission. In the spring of 1798, John Heckewelder and the Rev. Benjamin Mortimer repaired to Fairfield "by way of the Genessee county, Black Rock, Niagara, Grand River, and the Pinery in Upper Canada, to inform the congregation that the Congressional grant was perfected:" and thence, after a week's stay, Heckewelder and Edwards, with two young Indians, started for the Muskingum, to make the necessary preparations for a permanent settlement. Their route was by Detroit, Brownstown, River Raisen, rapids of the Maumee, Upper Sandusky, Owl Creek (now Vernon River) and the Forks of the Muskingum. In October, Zeisberger and Mortimer, with "a

large number of the Christian Indians from Fairfield," arrived on the Muskingum and founded Goshen. In 1804, a part of the Fairfield congregation removed to Petquotting, and renewed their missionary settlement, which the late Rev. E. Judson of Milan supposed to have been situated on the spot where Milan now stands. It was under the charge of Rev. Christian Frederic Dencke, but was relinquished in 1809, when the lands had been surveyed, and began to be appropriated by the whites. The Moravians returned to Fairfield.

David Zeisberger passed the remnant of his useful life at Goshen, Tuscarawas county, where he died November 7, 1808, aged 87 years, 7 months and 6 days. At the same place, in 1801, William Edwards had rested from his labors, aged about seventy. John Heckewelder, after remaining in the scenes of his early missionary life from 1801 to 1810, returned to Bethlehem, and became widely known as the author of the "Narrative of the Missions of the United Brethren among the Delaware and Mohegan Indians," and of an "Account of the History, Manners and Customs of the Indian Nations, who once inhabited Pennsylvania and the neighboring States," besides many other publications. He died at Bethlehem on the 31st of January, 1823, aged seventy-nine years, and nearly eleven months.

The influence of the white settlements upon the Indian colony of the Muskingum was so unfavorable," that their

11) At the session of the Territorial Legislature for 1799-1800, an act was passed to protect the Moravian Indians from the traffic in intoxicating liquors. The missionaries were authorized to seize the same whenever brought within the Schoenbrun tract, and "do with it as they should think proper;" and Heckewelder mentions that on one occasion "the missionary, Zeisberger, although then in his eightieth year, in his zeal for the cause in which he was engaged, took up an axe and stove the kegs so that the liquor ran into the river." The Moravian annalist adds, that "although this act

spiritual guardians at length induced Congress to adopt such measures as would tend to the removal of the Indians, and enable the society to divest itself of the trusteeship in the land. On the 4th of August, 1823, an agreement or treaty was entered into at Gnadenhutten between Lewis Cass, then Governor of Michigan, on the part of the United States, and Lewis de Schweinitz, on the part of the Moravian Missionary Society, as a preliminary step towards the retrocession of the land to the government. By this agreement, the members of the society relinquished their right as trustees, conditioned that the United States would pay six thousand six hundred and fifty-four dollars, being but a moiety of the money they had expended. The agreement could not be legal without the written consent of the Indians, for whose benefit the land had been donated. These embraced the remainder of the Christian Indians formerly settled on the land, "including Killbuck and his descendants, and the nephews and descendants of the late Captain White Eyes, Delaware chiefs." The Goshen Indians, as they were then called, repaired to Detroit for the purpose of completing the contract. On the 8th of November, they signed a treaty with Governor Cass, by which they relinquished their right to the lands, on condition that Government would pay them an annuity of four hundred dollars as long as they remained on the River Thames in Canada, or in lieu thereof, should they choose to return to the United States, secure to them a reservation of twenty-four thousand acres.

The trustees could not, however, divest themselves of all

of the missionary served as a check on some other disorderly people from their making similar attempts of bringing liquor to the town, yet, upon the whole, this act of the Assembly became highly offensive, and was termed an infringement on the rights and liberties of a free and independent people; and, consequently, soon repealed."

the associations of the Muskingum Mission. It is interesting to observe, that the fourth article of the treaty secures in perpetuity to the Society of United Brethren, free from any condition or limitation whatever, "ten acres of ground, including the church called Beersheba, and the grave yard on the Gnadenhutten tract; also the church lot, parsonage house and grave yard in the town of Gnadenhutten, * and also the missionary house and grave yard at Goshen." These still constitute links between the period, when the message of the cross was announced in the depth of a wilderness and amid the horrors of border warfare, and the passing era of material development and spiritual privileges.12

12) See Appendix No. X, for this final negotiation with the remnant of the Moravian congregation.

CHAPTER XXIV.

EMBASSIES AND NEGOTIATIONS BETWEEN THE UNITED STATES AND THE OHIO TRIBES

THE student of diplomacy, either as an art or in its relation to the events of history, will find no more suggestive field of inquiry, than is presented by the negotiations of the Indian tribes of North America. At the council fire, the loftiest qualities of their character have been conspicuousself-control, courtesy, dignity, eloquence, and that instinctive sagacity, which is the first requisite of statesmanship. Of this, Jefferson seemed conscious, when he triumphantly rested his defence of the native race of the American continent, against Buffon's imputation of inferiority, upon the terse and touching speech of the desolate Cayuga warrior, Logan.

The present chapter will relate to the negotiations with the Ohio Indians, between 1768 and the Territorial epoch. The American Revolution interrupted the dreams of power and wealth, in which the leading spirits of the Middle Colonies had indulged at the consummation of the Treaty of Fort Stanwix, on the 24th of October, 1768. Sir William Johnson, who conducted that negotiation, hoped to found a colony south of the Ohio; the envoys of Pennsylvania exulted at the extinction of the Indian title between the Alleghanies and the Ohio River, as far north as Kittaning;1 while Virginia was no less gratified by a still more westward extension of

1) The northwest corner of Cambria county, Pennsylvania.