THE REVEREND JOHN GOTTLIEB ERNESTUS HECKEWELDER “NARRATIVE HISTORY” AMOUNTS TO FABULATION, THE REAL STUFF BEING MERE CHRONOLOGY “Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project John Heckewelder HDT WHAT? INDEX JOHN HECKEWELDER THE REV. HECKEWELDER 1743 March 12, Saturday (1742, Old Style): John Gotlieb Ernestus Heckewelder was born in Bedford, England. NOBODY COULD GUESS WHAT WOULD HAPPEN NEXT John Heckewelder “Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project HDT WHAT? INDEX THE REV. HECKEWELDER JOHN HECKEWELDER 1754 The Heckewelder family emigrated to America when John Gotlieb Ernestus Heckewelder was 11 years old. They would settle in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania where he would attend the Moravian School for boys. He would be working as an apprentice to a cooper when an opportunity would arise for him to travel into the Ohio territory with a Moravian missionary. At this early point John had spent no time among native Americans and had no words of any of their languages — but this missionary needed some warm body as a teacher for Delaware children, and John was it. LIFE IS LIVED FORWARD BUT UNDERSTOOD BACKWARD? — NO, THAT’S GIVING TOO MUCH TO THE HISTORIAN’S STORIES. LIFE ISN’T TO BE UNDERSTOOD EITHER FORWARD OR BACKWARD. “Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project John Heckewelder HDT WHAT? INDEX JOHN HECKEWELDER THE REV. HECKEWELDER 1772 John Gotlieb Ernestus Heckewelder helped found a settlement named Schoenbrunn (“Beautiful Spring”) near the present New Philadelphia, Ohio. The first church in Ohio was built in this community. As many as 400 natives converted, mostly Delawares. The settlement would be so successful that additional settlements, Gnadenhutten, Lichtenau, Goshen, and Salem, would be founded. THE FUTURE IS MOST READILY PREDICTED IN RETROSPECT “Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project John Heckewelder HDT WHAT? INDEX THE REV. HECKEWELDER JOHN HECKEWELDER 1782 March 9, Saturday morning: During the Revolution, the Christianized native Americans were being trusted by the whites and by non-Christianized native Americans no more than they had been trusted earlier, during King Phillip’s War. The village of Gnadenhutten had about 100 Christian Indians, mostly Delawares, there to gather crops from their fields. Although the Christianized natives professed and practiced neutrality, the British, Americans, and other native Americans did not trust those living at Gnadenhutten. The leader of the mission, the Reverend David Zeisberger, had been tried by the British for treason but had been cleared of the accusations. During the maize harvest, some white settler families were attacked, and whites blamed those at Gnadenhutten for the violence. An American militia unit marched on Gnadenhutten and claimed to find there clothing from the murdered whites. They incarcerated these Christians in their church while they voted on their fate. Fewer than 20 of the approximately 100 whites voted against the slaughter. When the Christians learned of their fate, they spent the night praying and singing hymns, until the following morning all 28 adult males, 29 adult females, and 39 children were led from the church in pairs to have their skulls crushed with mallets. Soon after this massacre, other native Christian towns such as Schoenbrunn would of necessity be abandoned. After a final service was held at the church in Schoenbrunn the structure would be torn down to prevent desecration as the settlement was abandoned. Eventually everything that had been created in Schoenbrunn would be torched. The life work of the missionary teacher John Gotlieb Ernestus Heckewelder was quite destroyed. All that would remain would be the record of the attempt that had been made. Hey, guys, you made a jolly good try, you did, and blessings on you for that! HDT WHAT? INDEX JOHN HECKEWELDER THE REV. HECKEWELDER 1801 Moravian missionary John Gotlieb Ernestus Heckewelder met a native on Paumanok Long Island who passed along a cultural memory of his tribe’s 1609 encounter with the Discovery of Henry Hudson. THE FUTURE CAN BE EASILY PREDICTED IN RETROSPECT “Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project John Heckewelder HDT WHAT? INDEX THE REV. HECKEWELDER JOHN HECKEWELDER 1819 Presumably in this year, a series of the letters of John Wedderburn Halkett appeared in London as CORRESPONDENCE IN THE YEARS 1817, 1818, AND 1819, BETWEEN EARL BATHURST, AND J. HALKETT, ESQ. ON THE SUBJECT OF LORD SELKIRK’S SETTLEMENT AT THE RED RIVER, IN NORTH AMERICA. Moravian missionary John Gotlieb Ernestus Heckewelder’s AN ACCOUNT OF THE HISTORY, MANNERS, AND CUSTOMS, OF THE INDIAN NATIONS, WHO ONCE INHABITED PENNSYLVANIA AND THE NEIGHBOURING STATES. Philadelphia: A. Small; Volume I of the American Philosophical Society Transactions, of 1819. Thoreau would copy the following materials into his INDIAN NOTEBOOKS:1 Between the Mississippi & the ocean eastward & the Hudson’s Bay Company’s possessions on the north — “There appears to be but 4 principal languages,” some of their dialects “extend even beyond the Mississippi.” • 1st The Karabit — of the Greenlanders & Esquimaux... • 2d The Iroquois “This language in various dialects is spoken by the ... Six Nations ... Hurons ... and others.” • 3d The Lenape “This is the most widely extended of any of those that are spoken on this side of the Mississippi.” • [4th] The Indians further N.W. Blackfeet &c. of whose language we cannot judge “from the scanty vocabularies which have been given by Mackenzie ... and other travellers.” REVEREND HECKEWELDER In Volume #8 of these notebooks, Henry David Thoreau would also copy from this source that after some HDT WHAT? INDEX JOHN HECKEWELDER THE REV. HECKEWELDER hostilities the white intrusives into Virginia were given the new name Mechanschicau meaning “Long Knives” to distinguish them from other intrusives who had not killed natives with swords. “‘They never apply it [murderer] to the Quakers’ — They call them Quakels, not having in their language the sound to express your letter R.” RELIGIOUS SOCIETY OF FRIENDS Thoreau would also copy from this source the information that the original name for the place where Philadelphia stands had been Ku/egriena/ku meaning “the grove of the long pine trees,” and that this placename had been pronounced koo-ek-wen-aw-koo.2 June 6, Sunday: The North American Review mentioned that “a whole race of people has become nearly extinct,” an “unfortunate people, whose fate it has been, like the morning dew, insensibly and mysteriously to disappear, before the lights of civilization and christianity.” “That they should become extinct is inevitable,” the journal explained but “this cannot excuse us for pressing upon them with indecent haste. If they must perish, let them die a natural, and not a violent death.”3 Hawkins Wheeler saw a sea serpent, and reported that it “was entirely black; the head, which perfectly resembled a snake’s, was elevated from four to seven feet above the surface of the water, and his back appeared to be composed of bunches or humps, apparently about as large as, or a little larger than, a half barrel; I think I saw as many as ten or twelve.... I considered them to be caused by the undulatory motion of the animal — the tail was not visible, but from the head to the last hump that could be seen, was, I should judge, 50 feet.” SEA SERPENT SIGHTINGS Friend Stephen Wanton Gould wrote in his journal: 1st day 6th of 6th M / Our Meeting this morning was large & tho’ to me a season of some barraness, yet others no doubt were favord with life. - Jonathon Dennis - D Buffum & Hannah Dennis were in succession engaged to bear testimony. — In the Afternoon we were silent With Br D Rodman took tea at Jona Dennis. RELIGIOUS SOCIETY OF FRIENDS 1. The original notebooks are held by the Pierpont Morgan Library in New York, as manuscripts #596 through #606. There are photocopies, made by Robert F. Sayre in the 1930s, in four boxes at the University of Iowa Libraries, accession number MsC 795. More recently, Bradley P. Dean, PhD and Paul Maher, Jr. have attempted to work over these materials. 2. Henry David Thoreau’s INDIAN NOTEBOOKS are now at the Pierpont Morgan Library. These notebooks together comprise in total 2,800 handwritten pages. There are 11 of them, the 1st probably being completed during Thoreau’s sojourn at Walden Pond: for instance, on the 1st sheet of his 1st volume Thoreau jotted “Bug ate out of a table in Williamstown 73 years after the egg was laid.” He noted that he had gotten this material which would find its way into the final chapter of WALDEN; OR, LIFE IN THE WOODS from J.W. Barber’s MASSACHUSETTS HISTORICAL COLLECTIONS. See: Fleck, Richard F. (ed). THE INDIANS OF THOREAU: SELECTIONS FROM THE INDIAN NOTEBOOKS. Albuquerque NM: Hummingbird Press, 1974 3. Unsigned review of the Reverend Heckewelder’s AN ACCOUNT OF THE HISTORY, MANNERS AND CUSTOMS OF THE INDIANS NATIONS WHO ONCE INHABITED PENNSYLVANIA…, in North American Review, 6 (June 1819) 156, 170. HDT WHAT? INDEX THE REV. HECKEWELDER JOHN HECKEWELDER 1823 January 31, Friday: Back in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, the missionary teacher John Gotlieb Ernestus Heckewelder died. The Cortes having refused to make changes to the Spanish Constitution, the ambassadors of the Holy Alliance (Austria-France-Prussia-Russia) departed from Madrid. DO I HAVE YOUR ATTENTION? GOOD. John Heckewelder “Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project HDT WHAT? INDEX JOHN HECKEWELDER THE REV. HECKEWELDER 1824 4 James Buchanan, Esq. (British Consul to the State of New York). SKETCHES OF THE HISTORY, MANNERS, AND CUSTOMS, OF THE NORTH AMERICAN INDIANS WITH A PLAN FOR THEIR MELIORATION (New York: William Borradaile, two volumes in one). This work confessedly had based itself not upon any direct experience of the native American tribes but instead merely upon a reading of Moravian missionary John Gotlieb Ernestus Heckewelder’s AN ACCOUNT OF THE HISTORY, MANNERS, AND CUSTOMS, OF THE INDIAN NATIONS, WHO ONCE INHABITED PENNSYLVANIA AND THE NEIGHBOURING STATES, which although published in 1819 had never been made extensively available (and Heckewelder had died in 1823).