They were no less cruel to the
redmen whom they ruled, and at the height of their bloody careers
made futile the Moravian missionaries' long labors, and destroyed
the beautiful hamlet of the Christian Indians, called Gnaddenhutten,
or Village of Peace.
And while the border produced such outlaws so did it produce hunters
Eke Boone, the Zanes, the McCollochs, and Wetzel, that strange,
silent man whose deeds are still whispered in the country where he
once roamed in his insatiate pursuit of savages and renegades, and
who was purely a product of the times. Civilization could not have
brought forth a man like Wetzel. Great revolutions, great crises,
great moments come, and produce the men to deal with them.
The border needed Wetzel. The settlers would have needed many more
years in which to make permanent homes had it not been for him. He
was never a pioneer; but always a hunter after Indians. When not on
the track of the savage foe, he was in the settlement, with his keen
eye and ear ever alert for signs of the enemy. To the superstitious
Indians he was a shadow; a spirit of the border, which breathed
menace from the dark forests. To the settlers he was the right arm
of defense, a fitting leader for those few implacable and unerring
frontiersmen who made the settlement of the West a possibility.
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