Ohio History Journal

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DIARY OF A MORAVIAN INDIAN MISSION

DIARY OF A MORAVIAN INDIAN MISSION

MIGRATION ACROSS PENNSYLVANIA

IN 1772

Translated and edited by AUGUST C. MAHR

Professor of German, Ohio State University

The travel diary presented in these pages deals with the

migration of Indian convert members of the Moravian Church

from northeastern to northwestern Pennsylvania in the summer

of 1772. Undertaken as a measure of extreme necessity and

directed by two competent missioners, this expedition carried out

only in part the Moravian Mission's full intention: to transplant its

Pennsylvania Indian converts into the Muskingum basin in eastern

Ohio. This diary, describing that laborious trek throughout the full

length of Pennsylvania, antedates by eight months the Rev. John

Heckewelder's diary account of a river journey by which he con-

veyed a great many of these same converts, with all their be-

longings, from the Great Beaver mission of Friedensstadt

(Langundoutenunk) to Schonbrunn and Gnadenhutten, the new

missions just founded on the Tuscarawas River in Ohio. Never-

theless, Heckewelder's diary was printed in this magazine prior

to the present one.1 The proper chronological order of publication

was reversed for a simple reason: at the time that Heckewelder's

diary was being prepared for the printer, the manuscript of the

present diary had not even been known to exist, for not until

late in 1951 was it "discovered" among other manuscripts in the

documents collection of the Ohio State Archaeological and His-

torical Society, and its identity established by this writer.

The following historical and biographical survey may serve to

demonstrate the import of the diary presented below for the study

of the pre-Revolutionary situation in eastern Ohio, which, in the

early 1770's, was essentially determined by the active presence of

1 August C. Mahr, tr. and ed., "A Canoe Journey from the Big Beaver to the

Tuscarawas in 1773: A Travel Diary of John Heckewelder," Ohio State Archae-

ological and Historical Quarterly, LXI (1952), 283-298.

The preparation of both these articles was supported in part from funds granted

to Ohio State University by the Research Foundation at Ohio State University for

aid in fundamental research.

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