Ohio History Journal

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DAVID ZEISBERGER'S HISTORY OF THE NORTHERN

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

Vol. XIX-1.            1