some of the demoralized officers tampered with the public stores.
It was said that much dissipation prevailed in the garrison, to which
accusation Clark answered sarcastically: "However agreeable such conduct
might have been to their sentiments, I believe they seldom had the means
in their power, for they were generally in a starving condition" (_do_.,
Vol. III., pp. 347 and 359).] As this did not include the troops at the
Falls, nor the large shifting population, nor the "fort soldiers," the
weaker men, graybeards, and boys, who could handle a rifle behind a
stockade, it is probable that there were then somewhere between four and
five thousand souls in Kentucky.

CHAPTER V.

THE MORAVIAN MASSACRE, 1779-1782.

The Moravians.

After the Moravian Indians were led by their missionary pastors to the
banks of the Muskingum they dwelt peacefully and unharmed for several
years. In Lord Dunmore's war special care was taken by the white leaders
that these Quaker Indians should not be harmed; and their villages of
Salem, Gnadenhutten, and Schoenbrunn received no damage whatever. During
the early years of the Revolutionary struggle they were not molested,
but dwelt in peace and comfort in their roomy cabins of squared timbers,
cleanly and quiet, industriously tilling the soil, abstaining from all
strong drink, schooling their children, and keeping the Seventh Day as a
day of rest. They sought to observe strict neutrality, harming neither
the Americans nor the Indians, nor yet the allies of the latter, the
British and French at Detroit. They hoped thereby to offend neither
side, and to escape unhurt themselves.

But this was wholly impossible. They occupied an utterly untenable
position. Their villages lay mid-way between the white settlements
southeast of the Ohio, and the towns of the Indians round Sandusky, the
bitterest foes of the Americans, and those most completely under British
influence. They were on the trail that the war-parties followed whether
they struck at Kentucky or at the valleys of the Alleghany and
Monongahela. Consequently the Sandusky Indians used the Moravian
villages as halfway houses, at which to halt and refresh themselves
whether starting on a foray or returning with scalps and plunder.

The Wild Indians Hate Them.

By the time the war had lasted four or five years both the wild or
heathen Indians and the backwoodsmen had become fearfully exasperated
with the unlucky Moravians. The S