Author’s Note
In 1755, as the early flames of the French and Indian War ignited the American frontier, French raiders slaughtered eleven unresisting Christian members of the Delaware tribe at the Moravian settlement of Gnadenhutten in Pennsylvania. Years later at a settlement reprising the same mission name in the Ohio lands, frontier militia captured ninety-six Christian Delaware men, women, and children, lined them up, and one by one, as the victims prayed, crushed their skulls with mallets.
The tales of the Gnadenhutten massacres, upon which the Bethel Church killings are loosely based, have always wrenched my heart, not just for the obvious brutality inflicted on innocents but also for its deeper symbolism. The tribal victims had assimilated, had trusted, had suffered stigma from the
