continued to dwell
on the Muskingum, was absolutely inevitable. With blind fatuity their
leaders, the missionaries, refused to see the impending doom; and the
poor, simple Indians clung to their homes till destroyed. The American
commander at Pittsburg, Col. Gibson, endeavored to get them to come into
the American lines, where he would have the power, as he already had the
wish, to protect them; he pointed out that where they were they served
in some sort as a shield to the wild Indians, whom he had to spare so as
not to harm the Moravians. [Footnote: Loskiel, p. 137.] The Half King
of the Wyandots, from the other side, likewise tried to persuade them
to abandon their dangerous position, and to come well within the Indian
and British lines, saying: "Two mighty and angry gods stand opposite to
each other with their mouths wide open, and you are between them, and
are in danger of being crushed by one or the other, or by both."
[Footnote: State Department MSS., No. 41, Vol. III., pp. 78, 79; extract
from diary of Rev. David Zeisburger.] But in spite of these warnings,
and heedless of the safety that would have followed the adoption of
either course, the Moravians followed the advice of their missionaries
and continued where they were. They suffered greatly from the wanton
cruelty of their red brethren; and their fate remains a monument to
the cold-blooded and cowardly brutality of the borderers, a stain on
frontier character that the lapse of time cannot wash away; but it is
singular that historians have not yet pointed out the obvious truth,
that no small share of the blame for their sad end should be put to
the credit of the blind folly of their missionary leaders. Their only
hope in such a conflict as was then raging, was to be removed from
their fatally dangerous position; and this the missionaries would not
see. As long at they stayed where they were, it was a mere question of
chance and time whether they would be destroyed by the Indians or the
whites; for their destruction at the hands of either one party or the
other was inevitable.

Their fate was not due to the fact that they were Indians; it resulted
from their occupying an absolutely false position. This is clearly shown
by what happened twenty years previously to a small community of
non-resistant Christian whites. They were Dunkards--Quaker-like
Germans--who had built a settlement on the Monongahela. As they helped
neither side, both distrusted and hated the