DAVID ZEISBERGER'S
HISTORY OF THE NORTHERN
AMERICAN INDIANS.
EDITED BY ARCHER BUTLER HULBERT AND
WILLIAM
NATHANIEL SCHWARZE.
INTRODUCTION.
The present volume reproduces the
manuscript written in
German by the Moravian hero-missionary,
The Reverend David
Zeisberger, at his mission home beside
the Muskingum River, in
Ohio, in the years 1779 and 1780.
Though there is extant a most excellent
biography of this
noble man, The Life and Times of
David Zeisberger, by Bishop
Edmund De Schweinitz (Philadelphia,
1870), very little is popu-
larly known of him.
In the center of the old Black Forest of
America, near New
Philadelphia, Ohio, a half-forgotten
Indian graveyard lies be-
side the dusty country road. You may
count here several score
of graves by the slight mounds of earth
that were raised above
them a century or so ago. At one
extremity of this plot of
ground an iron railing incloses another
grave marked by a plain
marble slab. The grave is David
Zeisberger's, -Moravian Mis-
sionary to Indians in New York,
Pennsylvania, Ohio, Michigan,
and Canada for fifty active years, who
was buried at this spot
at his dying request, that he might
await the Resurrection among
his faithful Indians. His record is
perhaps unequalled in point
of length of service by the record of
any missionary in any land.
On a July night in 1726 a man and his
wife fled from their
home in Austrian Moravia toward the
mountains on the border
of Saxony, for conscience' sake. They
took with them nothing
save their five-year-old boy, who ran
stumbling between them,
holding to their hands. The family of
three remained in Saxony
ten years. Then the parents emigrated to
America, leaving the
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