On April 6, 1780, during the American Revolutionary War, a contingent of Delaware Christian Indians led by John Heckwelder, an assistant to Moravian missionary David Zeisberger, founded Salem, the last of five missions to occupy the Tuscarawas Valley between May 3, 1772 and September 8, 1781. The mission stood immediately adjacent to the west bank of the Tuscarawas River. Eighteen months later, British led Indian soldiers forcibly removed to the Upper Sandusky region all 400 Indian converts then living in the Tuscarawas Valley at the New Schoenbrunn, Gnadenhutten, and Salem missions. Seventeen years later, Zeisberger returned to the Tuscarawas Valley and founded his last mission at Goshen on October 4, 1798. John Gottlieb Ernestus Heckwelder, born in Bedford, England, on March 12, 1743, immigrated to America with his mother and father at age eleven. In 1762, at age nineteen, he accompanied Christian Frederick Post to the Tuscarawas Valley in an aborted attempt to found an Indian mission among the Delaware, but the Pontiac uprising interrupted the effort and Heckwelder barely escaped death from hostile Indians opposed to the project. At Zeisberger's request in 1771, Heckwelder entered missionary service, was ordained in 1778, and served until 1786. In 1788, he was appointed the agent in Ohio for the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel and served until 1810. In 1798, he cooperated with Zeisberger at the Goshen mission and founded the white settlement of Gnadenhutten.