A Treasury of Foolishly Forgotten Americans Read Free Page B

hands of Savages,” an inscription on the memorial read, “Tom Quick never abated his hostility to them until the day of his death, a period of over forty years.” By some accounts, the body count reached ninety-nine Delaware, though local historians limit it to four or five. The true number, like so much of Tom Quick’s life, is obscured by legend. The only certainty is that Milford had seen fit to memorialize a serial killer.
    One of Quick’s few documented victims was his boyhood friend Mushwink, the son of a Delaware chieftain. The two had grown up together after the Quick family became the first white settlers of the northeastern Pennsylvania area around Milford in 1733. The local Delaware—by then a defeated tribe paying tribute to the six-nation Iroquois Confederacy—treated the Quicks kindly, and Tom and Mushwink became constant companions. Together they explored the great forests of the region, where Tom learned to hunt and trap with great skill and daring. The boys were like brothers, each practically adopted into the other’s family. It was an idyll not destined to last.
    William Penn had established good relations with the Delaware when he led a group of English Quakers to the new colony of Pennsylvania in 1682. His successors, however, were not so benevolent. Fraudulent land grabs, like the infamous Walking Purchase of 1737, 1 and an ever-expanding European immigrant population pushed the Delaware farther and farther west, away from their homeland along the river for which they were named. It was only around the Quick homestead, their traditional burial grounds, that the Delaware remained in any significant numbers.
    The increasing bitterness of the displaced tribe came to full fruition during the French and Indian War, when the British and the French, along with their Native American allies, clashed over territory, particularly around the Ohio River Valley. The Delaware, allied with the French, launched fierce raids into their former lands in eastern Pennsylvania, burning homes, pillaging livestock, and scalping men, women, and children alike. “Just now arrived in town an express from our frontiers with the bad news that eight families of Pennsylvania were cut off last week,” Benjamin Franklin, then postmaster of the colony, wrote to London in 1755. “Thirteen men and women were found scalped and dead and twelve children missing.” It was during this time that Tom Quick turned homicidal.
    The Quick family and their white neighbors had taken refuge from the marauding tribe in a fortified stone house across the Delaware River in New Jersey. They had only carried with them a month’s worth of supplies, however, and as hunger and illness threatened to deplete them in the winter of 1756, Tom, his father, and a brother-in-law ventured back across the frozen river to a mill owned by Tom’s father. There they worked all night grinding corn. The following morning, heavily laden with sacks of cornmeal, the men started back. Nearly midway across the river, amid Delaware war cries, shots rang out from the Pennsylvania shore. Tom’s father fell. Rushing to his aid, Quick found the old man stricken. “I’m a dead man,” he gasped. “I can go no further. Leave me. Run for your lives.”
    With the Delaware war party rapidly approaching, Tom had little choice but to flee to the other side of the river with his brother-in-law as the Indians fell upon his father. Safe on the shore, he watched helplessly as they stripped the elder Quick of his silver buttons and shoe buckles, then scalped him. Tom could just make out the features of the Delaware leader leaning over his father and desecrating his corpse. It was his boyhood friend, Mushwink. Overwhelmed with rage, Tom swore revenge. His oath is recorded in the Quick family papers: “The blood of the whole Indian race is not sufficient to atone for the blood of my father.”
    Tales of the murderous