less and peaceable Cheyennes at Sand Creek, and have threatened to do again to helpless and peaceable Utes in 1880. The word “extermination” is as ready on the frontiersman’s tongue to-day as it was a hundred years ago; and the threat is more portentous now, seeing that we are, by a whole century of prosperity, stronger and more numerous, and the Indians are, by a whole century of suffering and oppression, fewer and weaker. But our crime is baser and our infamy deeper in the same proportion.
Close upon this Conestoga massacre followed a “removal” of friendly Indians—the earliest on record, and one whose cruelty and cost to the suffering Indians well entitle it to a place in a narrative of massacres.
Everywhere in the provinces fanatics began to renew the old cry that the Indians were the Canaanites whom God had commanded Joshua to destroy; and that these wars were a token of God’s displeasure with the Europeans for permitting the “heathen” to live. Soon it became dangerous for a Moravian Indian to be seen anywhere. In vain did he carry one of the Pennsylvania governor's passports in his pocket. He was liable to be shot at sight, with no time to pull his passport out. Even in the villages there was no safety. The devoted congregations watched and listened night and day, not knowing at what hour they might hear the fatal warwhoop of hostile members of their own race, coming to slay them; or the sudden shots of white settlers, coming to avenge on them outrages committed by savages hundreds of miles away.
With every report that arrived of Indian massacres at the North, the fury of the white people all over the country rose to greater height, including even Christian Indians in its unreasoning hatred, But, in the pious language of a narrative written by one of the Moravian missionaries, “God inclined the hearts of the chief magistrates to protect them. November 6th an express arrived from Philadelphia, bringing an or-
