A day or two later Yost’s mill, about eleven miles from Bethlehem, was destroyed, and the people there cut off. Altogether twenty-three persons were killed and many wounded, and these depredations committed within a few miles of Captain Bull’s ancestral home.
On Saturday, October 15, the self-same day that Major Clayton’s expedition set out from Fort Augusta for Wyoming, the settlers of Mill Creek, in Wyoming Valley, were busily engaged in their various occupations at different places unaware of danger and unprepared for disaster.
Captain Bull and his warriors to the number of 135 swooped down on the settlers and death, desperation and destruction quickly followed. Eighteen or more were killed, including many persons of importance. The scene was terrible.
The settlers who heard the gun shots and war whoops of the Indians fled in great haste to the mountains. At night time the torch was applied and soon the homes of the settlers were masses of ruins.
The settlers who escaped death tramped back to Connecticut, and Wyoming was, in very truth, deserted and forsaken.
Major Clayton arrived soon after this massacre, but did not remain, and returned to Fort Augusta. An extract from a letter written by a soldier says:
“Our party under Major Asher Clayton is returned from Wyoming, where we met with no Indians, but found the New Englanders who had been killed and scalped a day or two before we got there. We buried the dead—nine men and a woman—who had been most cruelly butchered.
“The woman was roasted, and had two hinges in her hands—supposed to be put in red hot—and several of the men had awls thrust in their eyes, and spears, arrows, pitchforks, etc., sticking in their bodies.
“They (Clayton’s troops) burnt what houses the Indians had left, and destroyed a quantity of Indian corn. The enemy’s tracks were up the river toward Wyalusing.”
Many writers have expressed different opinions about this massacre. Some thought it to have been done by the Delaware who believed the Connecticut settlers killed their king Tedyuskung; some believe it to have been done by Six Nations, who thought the whites had assassinated the Delaware king; but others believe there is not sufficient ground for supposing it to have been done by friends of Tedyuskung, even though the hostile party was led by his son, Captain Bull.