[252] See page 140, and following.
[253] Star in the West, p. 138.
[254] This relation is authentic. I have received it from the mouth of the chief of the injured party, and his statement was confirmed by communications made at the time by two respectable magistrates of the county.
[255] [This outrage was committed at the public house of John Stenton, which stood on the road leading from Bethlehem to Fort Allen, a short mile north of the present Howertown, Allen township, Northampton County. Stenton belonged to the Scotch-Irish, who settled in that region as early as 1728.]
[256] [Nescopeck was an Indian settlement on the highway of Indian travel between Fort Allen and the Wyoming Valley.]
[257] Justice Geiger’s letter to Justice Horsefield proves this fact
[258] [These unprovoked barbarities were perpetrated by a squad of soldiers who, in command of Captain Jacob Wetterholt, of the Provincial service, were in quarters at the Lehigh Water Gap, Carbon County, Pa.]
[259] [In this paragraph, Mr. Heckewelder briefly alludes to the last foray made by Indians into old Northampton County, south of the Blue Mountain. It occurred on the 8th of October, 1763. An account of the affair at Stenton’s, on the morning of that day, in which Stenton was shot dead, and Captain Jacob Wetterholt and several of his men seriously or mortally wounded, was published in Franklin’s Pennsylvania Gazette, of October 18th, 1763. Leaving Stenton’s, after the loss of one of their number, the Indians crossed the Lehigh, and on their way to a store and tavern on the Copley creek, (where they also had been wronged by the whites,) they murdered several families residing within the limits of the present Whitehall township, Lehigh County. Laden with plunder, they then struck for the wilderness north of the Blue Mountain. Upwards of twenty settlers were killed or captured on that memorable day, and the buildings on several farms were laid in ashes.]
[260] [The 5,000 acres at Nazareth, which Whitefield sold to the Moravians in 1741, were first held by Lætitia Aubrey, to whom it had been granted by her father, William Penn, in 1682. The right of erecting this tract, or any portion thereof, into a manor, of holding court-baron thereon, and of holding views of frankpledge for the conservation of the peace, were special privileges accorded to the grantee by the grantor. It was one of few of the original grants similarly invested. The royalty, however, in all cases remained a dead letter.]
[261] Alluding to what was at that time known by the name of the long day’s walk.