III
Two Journals of Western Tours, by Charles Frederick Post: one, to the neighborhood of Fort Duquesne (July-September, 1758); the other to the Ohio (October, 1758-January 1759)
Source: Proud’s History of Pennsylvania (Philadelphia, 1798), ii, appendix.
INTRODUCTORY NOTE
Christian Frederick Post, author of the following journals, was a simple, uneducated missionary of the Moravian Church. His chief qualifications for the perilous journeys herein detailed, were his intimate acquaintance with Indian life and character, the belief of the tribesmen in his truthfulness and honesty, and his own steadfast courage and trust in the protection of a higher power. Born in Polish Prussia in 1710, Post early came under the influence of the Moravians, whose remarkable missionary movement was just beginning to germinate.
The first attempt of this church to christianize the American Indians in Georgia having failed because of Spanish hostility, the Moravian disciples removed to Pennsylvania (1739), and were granted land on which to establish their colony at Bethlehem. Thither in 1742 came Post, eager to join in evangelizing the Indians; for which purpose he was sent the following year to assist Henry Rauch in his mission to the Mohegans and Wampanoags. This mission had been established about 1740, Count Zinzendorf, the great Moravian bishop, having visited its site at Shekomeko (Pine Plains, Dutchess County, New York) and baptized three Indians as its first fruits. The work spread to the neighboring Indian villages of Connecticut, and Post was assigned to a circuit in Sharon Township, Litchfield County, consisting of the villages of Pachgatgoch and Wechquadnach. Here, in his zeal for the service, he married a converted Indian woman (1743), and endeared himself to all the tribe.
But persecutions began to assail the humble brethren and their converts; they were accused of being papists, arrested and haled before local magistrates, by whom they were no sooner released than a mob of those whose gain in pampering to Indian vices was endangered by Moravian success, set upon them and rendered their lives and those of their new converts intolerable. Post, who had been on a journey to the Iroquois country (1745), was arrested at Albany and sent to New York, where he was imprisoned for seven weeks on a trumped-up charge of abetting Indian raids.