The Gnadenhutten Massacre

Somehow, even "genocide" seems an inadequate description for what happened, yet rather than viewing it with horror, most Americans have conceived of it as their country's manifest destiny.
—Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, An Indigenous Peoples' History of the United States, p. 79. 

Today is the anniversary of such a horror, and until today it was one I had never heard of, not even in reading books like Dunbar-Ortiz's. I guess that's because there are just too many like it for a casual learner to know of them all without a source like the Equal Justice Institute, which shares facts on the day they happened. 

Today is the anniversary of the Gnadenhutten Massacre in 1782, in what became Ohio, about 20 miles south of Canton.

Christianized pacifist members of the Delaware tribe staying at Gnadenhutten were blamed for raids by other Indigenous people. A troop of Pennsylvania militiamen actually voted on whether to execute them or not, which is worse than if it had been done in the heat of the moment. They then waited until the next morning to carry it out, and listened to their victims singing hymns and praying through the night, before bludgeoning them to death.

There were more children among the murdered than either men or women. The Wikipedia page has more gruesome details.

According to EJI,

The Gnadenhutten Massacre has been called the greatest atrocity of the Revolutionary War. When the U.S. Congress learned of the incident, it ordered an investigation. However, the investigation was soon called off due to concerns an inquiry would "produce a confusion and ill will amongst the people."

I wonder if that would have been true at the time, given attitudes among European American settlers toward Native people.

In 1889, Theodore Roosevelt called the killings "a stain on frontier character that the lapse of time cannot wash away." He was right that it cannot be washed away, but his idea that it is a stain on frontier character is all too typical of his and others' mentality. 

It is the very nature of frontier mentality, rather than its antithesis.