Pontiac's Rebellion school massacre
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The Pontiac's Rebellion school massacre was an incident during 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 the schoolhouse were schoolmaster Enoch Brown and twelve students. Brown pleaded with the warriors to spare the children before being shot and later scalped. The warriors then began to tomahawk and scalp the children. Nine children were killed and two children who had been scalped survived.
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] 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.
