Unless I'm mistaken, Christian Miksch was a blacksmith--not a gunsmith--in Nazareth. Your friend seems to have joined together two stories that weren't originally connected.
The story that your friend quotes about the coal in Nazareth in 1798 appeared in Mathew Schropp Henry's
History of the Lehigh Valley (1860) (the William Henry in this story is William Henry II [1757-1821], the father of Mathew Schropp Henry):
"In the books of William Henry an entry is made in 1798, having received from Frederick Sheckler 114 bushels of "stonecoal," for which Mr. Sheckler was paid five shillings per bushel (66 2/3 cents), delivered at Nazareth (this would be about $18 to $20 per ton). Mr. Henry was then engaged in manufacturing two thousand muskets, contracted with Governor Mifflin, of Pennsylvania. In the course of that business, he had employed an excellent blacksmith, residing in Nazareth, named Christian Micksch; this man was prevailed upon to try to make use of this coal, but after three or four days' trial, altering his fire-place frequently, placing the too-iron higher or lower, and otherwise using every possible means to make it burn, but all to no purpose, became impatient, and in a passion threw all the coal he had in his shop into the street, and in an angry mood came running to Mr. Henry's house (where the writer then was standing at the front door, a boy of about nine years of age), he asked, "Is your father at home?" I said, "Yes, sir." Perceiving that something was going wrong, I entered the house to hear his errand; when he saw my father, he thus addressed him: "I can do nothing with your 'black stones,' and therefore threw them out of my shop into the street; I can't make them burn; if you want any work done with them you may do it yourself; everybody laughs at me for being such a fool as to try to make stones burn, and they say that you must be a fool for bringing them to Nazareth."Notice that Micksch is identified as a
blacksmith--and the Nazareth Moravian records always refer to Christian Miksch as a blacksmith, never as a gunsmith.
The other story, about the gunsmith in 1750 or so, isn't connected to Micksch. I think it was first told by William Henry (William Henry III, in this case) to Horace Hollister for his
History of the Lackawanna Valley (1857). Henry wrote:
"At Christian Spring (near Nazareth) there was living about the year 1750 to '55 a gunsmith, who, upon application being made him by several Indians, to repair their rifles, replied that he was unable to comply immediately, 'for,' says he, 'I am entirely bare of charcoal, but as I am now engaged in setting some wood to char it, therefore you must wait several weeks.' This the Indians (having come a great distance) felt loth to do; they demanded a bag from the gunsmith, and, having received it, went away, and in two days returned with as much stone coal as they could well carry. They refused to tell where they had procured it."These two stories got run together, I think, because a few paragraphs later Hollister also tells the 1798 "bushel of coal" story --and Hollister calls Christian Micksch a gunsmith instead of a blacksmith, which is, I think, a simple mistake.
Hollister doesn't, however, suggest that Micksch was the gunsmith described in the 1750 story about the Indians. Indeed Miksch wasn't alive in 1750: he was born in 1752 at Bethlehem, was trained there as a blacksmith, and died in 1823 at Nazareth.
Scott
