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They gave them the night to prepare for death. One poor woman fell on her knees before Williamson and begged for her life, but the most of them seem to have submitted without a word. They spent the night in prayer and singing, and when their butchers sent at daybreak to know if they were ready, they answered that they had received the assurance of God’s peace. Then the murderers parted the women and children from the men and shut them up in another cabin, and the two cabins they fitly called the slaughterhouses. One of them found a cooper’s mallet in the cooper’s shop, where the men were left, and saying: “How exactly this will answer for the business,” he made his way through the kneeling ranks to one of the most fervent of the converts, and struck him down.

While the Indians still prayed and sang, he killed twelve more of them, and then passed the mallet to another butcher with the words: “My arm fails me. Go on in the same way. I think I have done pretty well.” Among the women and children the slaughter began with a very old and pious widow, and soon the sound of the singing and the praying was silenced in death.

The victims were scalped as they fell, and when the bloody work was done, the cabins were set on fire and the bodies burned in the burning buildings. Two boys who had been scalped with the rest feigned death, and when the murderers had left them they tried to escape. One stuck fast in the window and was burned, but the other got safely away and lived to tell the awful tale.

The backwoodsmen themselves seem not to have been ashamed of their work, though it is said that Williamson could never be got to speak of it. The event was so horrible that it killed the Moravians’ hopes of usefulness among the Ohio Indians. The teachers settled with the remnant of their converts in Canada, but the Christian Indians always longed for Gnadenhutten, where they had lived so happily, and where ninety-six of their brethren had suffered so innocently. Before the close of the century Congress confirmed the Delawares’ grant of the Muskingum lands to them, and they came back. But they could not survive the crime committed against them. The white settlers pressed close about them; the War of 1812 enkindled all the old hate against their race. Their laws were trampled upon and their own people were seen drunk in the streets.

Some of the Christians had fallen back into heathen savagery. One of these, who was found in a war party, painted and armed like the rest for a foray against the whites, said to a Christian brother: “I cannot but have bad thoughts of our teachers. I think it was their fault that so many of our countrymen were murdered in Gnadenhutten. They betrayed us…. Tell me now, is this the truth or not?” He had lost his children and all his kindred in that fearful carnage, and yet he could not believe his own accusations against the Moravians. He added mournfully: “I have now a wicked and malicious heart, and therefore my thoughts are evil. As I look outwardly, so is my heart within. What would it avail, if I were outwardly to appear as a believer, and my heart were full of evil?”