The Provincial Government did not act with the energy and promptness which the emergency demanded. No means were adopted for the protection of frontier settlements and the entire wilderness from the Juniata River to Shamokin, now Sunbury, was filled with parties of hostile Indians, murdering, scalping and burning. Every post brought to the Provincial Council at Philadelphia heart-rending appeals for help.
The Assembly and the Governor were deadlocked, no money bills could be passed. Troops of frontiersmen rode through the city threateningly brandishing their weapons. A party of Germans laid the corpses of the countrymen, scalped within sixty-five miles of the capital, at the door of the State House. The Quaker peace policy was denounced in unmeasured terms from the backwoods pulpits.
The Indians had driven off the Moravian missions at Shamokin and burned their own town at that important place.
Two of Colonel Weiser’s sons, Frederick and Peter, had been at Shamokin several days previously, then stopped at the house of George Gabriel, at the mouth of Penn’s Creek about the head of the Isle of Que, near the present town of Selinsgrove. While there a messenger arrived from Logan, one of Shikellamy’s sons and Lapacpicton, a friendly Delaware, who brought the alarming news that a large body of French and Indians was approaching by way of the West Branch.
The Provincial Government had been warned that a band of Indians had left the West on an expedition to the forks of the Susquehanna, but paid no heed until too late.
These Indians crossed the Allegheny Mountains, through the headwaters of the Otzinachson, now called West Branch, near Clearfield, thence through the “Great Plains,” now known as Penn’s Valley, Center County, through the gaps of Penn’s Creek, in Paddy Mountains, where they struck the white settlements along the creek, commencing at the present town of New Berlin and down the stream for about a mile in what is now Snyder County.
October 16, 1755, occurred the terrible massacre at Penn’s Creek, when fifteen persons were cruelly murdered and their bodies terribly mangled and ten others were carried away as Indian prisoners.
Of the twenty-five victims, one man, who was wounded, was able to reach Gabriel’s with the news of the massacre.
When the party went out to bury the dead they found thirteen bodies of men and elderly women, and one child, two weeks old.
The house of Jacob Le Roy, where the massacre was ended, was burned and his body lying just by it. He lay on his back, barbarously burnt and two tomahawks sticking in his forehead.