Bloody Footprints 73Mcintosh] in his discretion shall think will most effectually chastise
and terrify the savages, and check their ravages on the frontiers."
The Shawnees moved out of the way of the raiders to avoid the at
tacks, but the killing went on unabated. 44
The settlers' escalation of extreme violence in the Ohio Country
led to perhaps the most outrageous war crime, which showed that
Indigenous conversion to Christianity and pacifism was no protec
tion from genocide. Moravian missionizing among the ravaged Del
aware communities in Pennsylvania had produced three Moravian
Indian villages in the decades before the war for independence had
begun. Residents of one of the settlements, named Gnadenhutten, in
eastern Ohio, were displaced by British troops during fighting in the
area, but were able to return to harvest their corn. Soon afterward,
in March 1782, a settler militia from Pennsylvania under the com
mand of David Williamson appeared and rounded up the Delawares,
telling them they had to evacuate for their own safety. There were
forty-two men, twenty women, and thirty-four children in the group
of Delawares. The militiamen searched their belongings to confis
cate anything that could be used as a weapon, then announced that
they were all to be killed, accusing them of having given refuge to
Delawares who had killed white people. They were also accused of
stealing the household items and tools they possessed, because such
items should only belong to white people. Condemned to death, the
Delawares spent the night praying and singing hymns. In the morn
ing, Williamson's men marched over ninety people in pairs into two
houses and methodically slaughtered them. One killer bragged that
he personally had bludgeoned fourteen victims with a cooper's mal
let, which he had then handed to an accomplice. "My arm fa ils me,"
he was said to have announced. "Go on with the work."45 This ac
tion set a new bar for violence, and atrocities that followed routinely
surpassed even that atrocity. 46
A year earlier, the Delaware leader Buckongeahelas had addressed
a group of Christianized Delawares, saying that he had known some
good white men, but that the good ones were a small number:
They do what they please. They enslave those who are not of
their color, although created by the same Great Spirit who