Trending
The long peace that William Penn and the Indians established near Philadelphia in 1683 ended abruptly along the Penns Creek on Oct. 16, 1755, in what eventually became Union and Snyder counties. That's the day Indian warriors from Western Pennsylvania emerged from the forest and attacked European settlers who had established homesteads along the creek near present-day New Berlin.
A few days later, a traveler came down the Susquehanna River and told John Harris at Harris' Ferry (modern Harrisburg) that a Pennsylvania German woman who lived along the creek had "called at a neighbor's house and saw two persons laying by the door ... murdered and scalped."
A number of settlers sought sanctuary at George Gabriel's trading post and homestead, which he established in 1754 at the mouth of Penns Creek in what is now Selinsgrove. This is clear from a letter that Harris sent to Gov. Robert H. Morris in Philadelphia: "We have a confirmation of two men being murdered within five miles of George Gabriel's, four women carried off, and there is one man wounded in three places escaped to Gabriel's."
The attack happened early in the French and Indian War, a matter of months after a British army led by Gen. Edward Braddock marched from Virginia across the Allegheny Mountains to force the French to evacuate the Ohio River Valley. In July, French soldiers from Fort DuQuesne (present-day Pittsburgh) and Indians defeated Braddock at the Monongahela River. The October raid on Penns Creek brought the war east to the Susquehanna River Valley, then on the Pennsylvania frontier.
Reports of the Penns Creek raid, sometimes containing contradictory details, were slow to reach the governor in southeast Pennsylvania.
Late in the month, for instance, Morris received an Oct. 22 letter from Conrad Weiser. "I received news from Shamokin that six families have been murdered on John Penn's Creek on the west side of Susquehanna. ... Several people have been found scalped and 28 are missing," Weiser said. "The people are in a great consternation and are coming down (the river), leaving their plantations and corn behind them."
Around this time, the men in Gabriel's neighborhood informed the governor that they had already gone to the scene of the attack. "We ... went out and buried the dead, whom we found most barbarously murdered and scalped. We found but 13, which were men and elderly women, and one child of two weeks old."
At the homestead of Jacob LeRoy, an immigrant from Switzerland, they discovered the log house "burnt up, and the man ... lying just by it. He lay on his back barbarously burnt and two tomahawks sticking in his forehead."
Another 12 settlers were missing -- "being young women and children we suppose to be carried away prisoners," the men reported.
The men asked the governor to provide "speedy relief." They said that they were too few in number to defend the region themselves, partly "for want of guns and ammunition." They emphasized "that without assistance we must fly and leave the country to the mercy of the enemy."
To underscore the urgency of their request, they sent the governor one of the tomahawks they had removed from LeRoy's forehead.
Around this time, Harris and other settlers living below the Blue Ridge Mountains organized a posse of about 40 men and rode up to the Indian town of Shamokin (now Sunbury) at the forks of the Susquehanna to assess the mood of the Indians there.
The riders reached the town on Oct. 24, received a peaceable welcome, and stayed overnight. As they left the next morning, friendly Indians advised them to go down the east shore, but the posse, fearing treachery, forded the river and followed the old trail along the west shore.
Below Gabriel's, "we were fired on by a good number of Indians that lay among the bushes, on which we were obliged to retreat with the loss of several men," reported posse member Adam Terrence. "... I'm positive I saw four fall, and one man struck on the head with a tomahawk in his flight across the river."
By Oct. 28, settlements all along the upper Susquehanna were ablaze. The pioneers were "abandoning their plantations, and we are in a dreadful situation," John Harris said in an Oct. 28 letter. At Selinsgrove, "the Indians burnt all George Gabriel's houses (and) danced round them," Harris said.
≤≤≤
John L. Moore is a writer and storyteller based in Northumberland. He welcomes email at: tomahawks1756@gmail.com. Information about the eight books in his Frontier Pennsylvania Series is online at: http://johnleonmoore.blogspot.com/.