Excerpt from Diary of David Zeisberger, Vol. 1: A Moravian Missionary, Among the Indians of Ohio, Translated From the Original German Manuscript and Edited The chief object of publishing Zeisberger's Diary is of course the furtherance of the study of American history, and certainly the work will be found to contain much in regard to the relations existing between the English and Indians in the fifteen years preceding the cession of the Western Posts to the United States in 1796. If I am not mistaken, however, the work will be equally interesting from a psychological point of view. The action of white men upon Indians, Christians upon heathen, the civilized upon savages, can well be studied in these pages. Here and there also can be observed the reaction of the Indian upon the white. My ambition as translator has been simply to render the German manuscript as nearly like the original as the differing idioms of the German and the English would permit. Where Zeisberger has left a sentence without logical conclusion, I have done likewise, nor have I thought it needful to call the readers attention to the fact; in the same way, if he has repeated a word, generally I have done the same. My failure, however, has been in reproducing the easy and lucid style of the original. The German word which I have rendered brethren, in the original includes both sexes, and in my translation it will sometimes occur with sisters in apposition; it seemed better thus to use the word than to depart too far from the text. It should perhaps be said that where brothers is used without qualification, the word refers usually to the missionaries, or to the whole body of clergy of the Moravian Church. All words or phrases marked with parentheses, thus ( ), are my explanations or interpolations, Zeisberger's parenthetical expressions being otherwise denoted. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.