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178 verted Indian woman (1743), and endeared himself to all the tribe.

But persecutions began to assail the humble brethren and their converts; they were accused of being papists, arrested and haled before local magistrates, by whom they were no sooner released than a mob of those whose gain in pampering to Indian vices was endangered by Moravian success, set upon them and rendered their lives and those of their new converts intolerable. Post, who had been on a journey to the Iroquois country (1745), was arrested at Albany and sent to New York, where he was imprisoned for seven weeks on a trumped-up charge of abetting Indian raids.

The situation made retreat necessary; therefore, in 1746, the Shekomeko and Connecticut settlements were broken up, and the Christian Indians with their missionaries moved in detachments to Pennsylvania, where, after kindly entertainment at Bethlehem, a town called Gnadenhütten (huts of Grace), was built for them, at Weisport, Carbon County. It was during their stay at Bethlehem that Rachel, Post's Indian wife, died (1747), and there two years later he married a Delaware convert, Agnes, who lived only until 1751.

Meanwhile, Post was employed as missionary assistant, going to Shamokin in 1747 to aid the missionary blacksmith established there, to clear and plant more ground. Again in 1749, he revisited the scene of his early labors, and helped David Bruce to re-establish a mission among the remnant left at Pachgatgoch. Two years later he was summoned to a more distant field on the dismal shores of Labrador, where a company of four Moravian brethren were sent to begin a mission to the Eskimos. An untoward accident rendered this project futile; the