The other Indian massacres, which inhabitants of the Conococheague Valley will ever relate, began with the appearance of savages on Sunday, July 22, 1764, when several were discovered near Fort Loudon.
On Wednesday Susan King Cunningham left her home and started through the woods to call on a neighbor. As she did not return when expected a search was made, and soon her body was found lying near her home. The fiends had not been content to murder and scalp this good woman, but had performed a Caesarian operation and had placed her child on the ground beside her.
The next day, July 26, occurred the murder of Enoch Brown, schoolmaster, and ten of his pupils. A tragedy unique in the long story of Indian atrocities.
This terrible massacre occurred about three miles north of Greencastle, Franklin County. Brown and each of the ten small children were killed and scalped, and a lad, Archibald McCullough, was scalped and left for dead among the other victims, but he recovered and lived for many years.
With few exceptions the scholars were much averse to going to school that morning. And the account afterward given by McCullough is that two of the scholars informed Mr. Brown that on their way to school they had seen Indians. The master paid no attention to what had been told him, and ordered them to their books.
Soon after school had opened three Indians rushed up to the door. The schoolmaster, seeing them, prayed the Indians only to take his life and spare the children, but they refused. The Indians stood at the door, whilst the third entered the school room, and with a piece of wood in the shape of a maul, killed the master and the scholars, after which all of them were scalped.
Young McCollough, left for dead, dragged himself to a spring a short distance from the school house where he slaked his burning thirst and washed his wound.
This Archie was a cousin of John and James McCullough, taken by the Indians in that same place exactly eight years before. John was at that time a captive and living with the Indians. In his interesting narrative he says that he knew the three Indians who murdered Brown and the children, and that he was present when they returned to their chief.
They were young Indians, not over twenty years of age. Old Night Walker, the chief, called them cowards for having so many children’s scalps.
Thus it is a singular coincidence that these two crimes should be committed on July 26, that McCulloughs should figure in them both, and that the only accurate details of each massacre are given by the only two survivors, John and Archie McCullough, yet they occurred eight years apart.