Enoch Brown school massacre
The Enoch Brown school massacre[1] was "one of the most notorious incidents"[2] of Pontiac's War. On July 26, 1764, four Delaware (Lenape) American Indian warriors entered a settlers' log schoolhouse in the Province of Pennsylvania in what is now Franklin County, near the present-day city of Greencastle.
Inside were the schoolmaster, Enoch Brown, and a number of young students. Brown pleaded with the warriors to spare the children; nonetheless he was shot and scalped.[3] The warriors then tomahawked and scalped the children. Brown and nine children were killed.[2][3] Two scalped children survived their wounds.[3] Four children were taken as prisoners.[2]
A day earlier, the warriors had encountered a pregnant woman, Susan King Cunningham, on the road. She was beaten to death, scalped, and the baby was cut out of her body.[3] When the warriors returned to their village on the Muskingum River in the Ohio Country and showed the scalps, an elder Delaware chief rebuked them as cowards for attacking children.[3]
John McCullough, a settler who had been held prisoner by the Delaware since 1756,[4] later described the return of the raiding party in his captivity narrative:
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I saw the Indians when they returned home with the scalps; some of the old Indians were very much displeased at them for killing so many children, especially Neep-paugh'-whese, or Night Walker, an old chief, or half king,—he ascribed it to cowardice, which was the greatest affront he could offer them.[5]
Incidents such as these prompted the Pennsylvania General Assembly, with the approval of Governor John Penn, to reintroduce the scalp bounty system previously used during the French and Indian War.[3] Settlers could collect $134 for the scalp of an enemy American Indian male above the age of ten; the bounty for women was set at $50.[6]
Settlers buried Enoch Brown and the schoolchildren in a common grave. In 1843, the grave was excavated to confirm the location of the bodies. In 1885, the area was named Enoch Brown Park and a memorial was erected over the gravesite.[7]
References
- ↑ Variations on the name in sources include the "Enoch Brown massacre" and the "Enoch Brown Indian massacre". Dixon calls it the "Enoch Brown Schoolhouse Massacre" (p. 223).
- ↑ 2.0 2.1 2.2 Middleton, p. 171
- ↑ 3.0 3.1 3.2 3.3 3.4 3.5 Dixon, p. 223
- ↑ Dixon, p. 95
- ↑ Archibald Loudon, A Selection of Some of the Most Interesting Outrages Committed by the Indians in Their Wars with the White People (New York, 1808; reprinted 1888), volume 1, p. 283
- ↑ Dixon, pp. 223–24
- ↑ Dixon, p. 318
Bibliography
- Dixon, David. Never Come to Peace Again: Pontiac's Uprising and the Fate of the British Empire in North America. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2005.
- Middleton, Richard. Pontiac's War: Its Causes, Course, and Consequences. New York: Routledge, 2007.
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