Colonel John Armstrong led 300 men of Cumberland County to Great Island, on the West Branch of the Susquehanna, the present site of the borough of Lock Haven, where certain of the marauders had their headquarters. On their arrival they found the place evacuated, horses, cattle and other spoils gathered in their forays being left behind.
With the main body of his men, Armstrong proceeded to another Indian village near Jersey Shore, where he found the late occupants had left in haste while eating a meal. So the expedition resulted in destroying their houses and corn fields.
Major Asher Clayton led a party from Harris’ Ferry to remove the Connecticut settlers from Wyoming and destroy their provisions, which were likely to be seized by the red men. When the party arrived at Wyoming, it found that the savages had been there before them and had burned the town and killed more than twenty persons in horrible torture.
A number of those Indians who had been converted by the Moravian missionaries around Bethlehem were murdered, as they were found asleep in a barn, by a party of Rangers, and the surprise and slaughter in turn of the latter increased the suspicion of the frontiersmen, who were neither Moravians nor Quakers, against the entire body of Christian red men, who professed a desire to live at peace and friendship with the English.
The Provincial Commissioners, indeed, reported their belief that those at Nain and Wichetunk (in what is now Polk Township, Monroe County) were secretly supplied by the Moravian brethren with arms and ammunition, which, in free intercourse with the hostile savages, were traded off to the latter.
About October 12 a number of armed men marched toward Wichetunk, but, waiting to surprise it by night, were frustrated by a violent storm just before nightfall, which wet their powder.
The missionary, the Rev. Bernard Adam Grube, then led the Indians to Nazareth, but the Governor suggested that to watch their behavior it would be better to disarm them and bring them to the interior parts of the province. The Assembly, actuated more by a desire to save them, agreed to the proposal.
Governor John Penn received the refugees from Nain and Wichetunk, but their arrival in the Northern Liberties of Philadelphia excited the lower classes nearly to a riot, and the soldiers refused to allow them any part of the barracks as a sheltering place, so that different arrangements were necessary.
For five hours these Indians were in great peril, but escorted by Quakers, they were finally taken to Province Island.
The conduct of the Assembly, in which there were twenty-one Quakers, failed to satisfy not only the royal and proprietary officers but also the Presbyterians, who were ready to take up arms, and particularly the Scotch-Irish on the frontier, who saw large sums of money lavished in the presents to Indians, while they themselves lay destitute from the ravages of an Indian war.