Enoch Brown School Massacre
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The Enoch Brown School Massacre was a notorious incident in Pontiac's Rebellion. On July 26, 1764, four Delaware (Lenape) American Indian warriors entered a log schoolhouse of white settlers in what is now Franklin County, Pennsylvania, near present Greencastle. Inside were the schoolmaster, Enoch Brown, and twelve young students. Brown pleaded with the warriors to spare the children before being shot and scalped. The warriors then began to tomahawk and scalp the children, killing nine or ten of them (reports vary). Two children who had been scalped survived.
A day earlier, the warriors also encountered a pregnant woman, Susan King Cunningham, on the road. She was beaten to death, scalped, and the fetus was cut out of her body and placed next to her.
Incidents such as these prompted the Pennsylvania Assembly to reintroduce the scalp bounties previously offered during the French and Indian War, which paid money for every American Indian killed above the age of ten, including women. The bounty was approved by Governor John Penn.
When the warriors returned to their village on the Muskingum River in the Ohio Country and showed the scalps they had taken, they were rebuked as cowards by an old Delaware chief.
Enoch Brown and the school children were buried in a common grave. In 1843, the grave was excavated to confirm the location of the bodies. In 1885, the area was designated Enoch Brown Park, and a memorial was erected.
[edit] See also
[edit] References
- Dixon, David. Never Come to Peace Again: Pontiac's Uprising and the Fate of the British Empire in North America. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2005.
- Dowd, Gregory Evans. War Under Heaven: Pontiac, the Indian Nations, & the British Empire. Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002.
