The school massacre did not begin in Columbine. The first recorded school massacre in U.S. history occurred more than a decade before the founding of the United States, when four Native Americans retaliated against the white settlers who occupied their land.
Pontiac War
When white settlers moved into the Great Lakes region in the 18th century, they brought upheaval to the indigenous peoples of the Americas who had settled in the region for hundreds of years. On May 7, 1763, Ottawa Tribal Chief Pontiac launched an attack on the British army in what is now Detroit in retaliation for the violence suffered by his people, leading to a series of hostilities known as the Pontiac War, which spread to Pennsylvania and upstate New York. Pennsylvania Governor John Penn, unhappy with the chaos, offered a bounty in exchange for native American scalps. In the months that followed, hordes of settlers murdered and scalped every Native American they could find.
Enoch Brown School Massacre
One of the most brutal events of the Pontiac War took place on July 26, 1764. Earlier in the day, four Native Americans from the Delaware Tribe beat a pregnant white woman to death with a stick before heading to an isolated log cabin near Greenborough, Pennsylvania. As the warriors stormed the school building, Mr. Enoch Brown pleaded with them to spare the students, but they beat him with sticks and proceeded to kill.
consequence
Surprisingly, a boy named Archie McCullough survived the massacre, most likely unconscious, mistaken for dead before the attackers left. When he woke up, he climbed down the hill to a spring where students often drank some water, and a few hours later, passers-by spotted him. After reporting what had happened, McCullough miraculously made a full recovery from his injury.
According to a report by a white settler who was captured by the tribe at the time, the group of fighters returned to their village along the Mastingen River in Ohio, proudly displaying the scalps they had collected, but their leader humiliated them for targeting women and children. Meanwhile, 10 murdered students and their teachers were buried in a public grave just days after the brutal attack. In 1885, in honor of the victims of the first school massacre in American history, a monument was built on the mausoleum site, and the area around the monument was later named Enoch Brown Park.