Joseph Kirkland

CONTEMPORANEOUS REPORTS.

H

MASSACRE TREE, 18th STREET.

TARDLY any one institution existing four score years ago, shows so wondrous a change as does the American newspaper. The steamboat, railroad, telegraph, telephone, power-press and other mechanical aids to the spreading of news have all been invented and perfected within that time, while gas and electric light have aided in the prompt reproduction of intelligence, and penny-postage in its dissemination. So that which was then an infant—say rather an embryo—is now a giant.

The very first published narrative of the massacre which is now at hand is the following account, very short and full of errors, taken from the Buffalo Gazette (date not given) and published in Niles' Weekly Register of October 3, 1812.[AG]

[AG] This paper, published in Baltimore, was the best general chronicle of events reported by correspondents or appearing in the few and meager outlying journals of the day.

Fall of Fort Dearborn, at Chicago.—Yesterday afternoon the Queen Charlotte arrived at Fort Erie, seven days from Detroit. A flag of truce soon landed, at Buffalo Creek, Major Atwater and Lieut. J. L. Eastman, who gave the following account of the fall of Fort Dearborn: On the first of September a Pottowatomie chief arrived at Detroit and stated that about the middle of August Captain Wells, from Fort Wayne [an interpreter], arrived at Fort Dearborn to advise the commandant of that fort to evacuate it and retreat. In the mean time a large body of Indians of different nations had collected and menaced the garrison. A council was held with the Indians, in which it was agreed that the party in the garrison should be spared on condition that all property in the fort should be given up. The Americans marched out but were fired upon and nearly all killed. There were about fifty men in the fort beside women and children, and probably not more than ten or twelve taken prisoners. Captain Wells and Heald [the commandant] were killed.

This brief report interests us in various ways. Detroit was in the British hands, and the Queen Charlotte a British ship, for Perry's victory had not yet been won. Major Atwater and Lieut. Eastman, here liberated by the British under flag of truce, were probably part of the army surrendered by General Hull on August 16, and paroled; these officers having remained in Detroit for some unexplained reason—perhaps because they were citizens of that city, as Atwater is an old Detroit name. (It has been given to a street there.) The Queen Charlotte was one of the ships captured by Perry on Sept. 10, 1813, and was sunk in Put-in-Bay, and twenty years later she was raised, repaired and put again in commission, this time as a trading-vessel, and it was on her that John Dean Caton, later Chief Justice of Illinois, and now (1893) an honored resident of Chicago, took passage at Buffalo with his bride, in 1834, and came to the land which was to be their home for sixty years.[AH]

[AH] Mrs. Caton died in 1892.

Regarding the rest of the fugitives we have very scanty reports. The next item we find is an utterly wild, false and fanciful statement of Mrs. Helm's vicissitudes, contradicting in every particular her own narrative, as given in Wau-Bun.

This is manifestly written to "fire the patriotic heart" of the country to rally to the defence of "Buffaloe," a frontier town in deadly fear of its Canadian neighbors, in sight beyond the Niagara River. Mrs. Helm herself must have learned with surprise that while she, with the rest of the Kinzie family, was hospitably entertained at "Parc-aux-vaches," on the St. Joseph, she was suffering "three months' slavery among the Indians;" and later, while living in Detroit, she was enduring "three months' imprisonment among their allies," the English. Also that during the five days after the massacre, when she tells us she was, with much discomfort and more alarm, living in the Kinzie mansion with her relatives, she was really dragging a canoe, barefooted, wading along the stream, deprived of all sustenance except the flesh of her murdered countrymen, especially poor Wells's carved-up and bleeding heart—which, by the way, she had only heard of; never seen! Such things serve very well to prove to us that, as creators of imaginative fiction, newspaper correspondents of those days were equal even to those of our own.

More absurd, if possible, is a letter printed in Niles' Register of May 8, 1813, purporting to have been written by one Walter Jordan, a non-commissioned officer of regulars, stationed at Fort Wayne, to his wife, in Alleghany County, dated Fort Wayne, October 19, 1812. In the first place, it is most unlikely that any such white man should have been in Captain Wells's company and remained unmentioned. We hear of nobody as arriving but Captain Wells and his thirty Miami Indians. In our day, it is true, a captain would be likely to be accompanied by an orderly; but Wells had been brought up in too stern a school to be provided with such an attendant. Then, too, the narrative bristles with absurdities. The story is as follows:

One is uncertain whether to rate this as a yarn made by some penny-a-liner out of such scraps as might be picked up from common rumor and the tales of returned stragglers of the thirty Indians who ran away when the attack began, or the lying story of a fellow who was really of the party, and one of the leaders, not in the fight, but in the flight. His enumeration of "one hundred Confute Indians," (no tribe of that name being known to history) in place of the band of thirty Miamis, his estimate of Captain Heald's "one hundred men, ten women and twenty children," his march of "half a mile," his statement that all were killed except fifteen, which would make the loss of life over two hundred, in place of Captain Heald's estimate of fifty-two, all tend to force the conclusion that there was no Walter Jordan in the matter. The latter part of the story, representing himself as heroically losing feather, epaulet and sword-hilt to the rascally savages, who still refrained from inflicting bodily injury on him, his then being kindly but firmly led to the place where poor Wells, in the presence of his niece, was waiting to have his head cut off and set up on a pole, and his heart cut out and divided among the chiefs, etc., tends to the belief that Walter Jordan was present, ran away, saved himself, reached Fort Wayne and devised this cock-and-bull story to explain his long absence, his personal safety and his possession of a horse which did not belong to him. Another hypothesis is that he started from Fort Wayne with Wells, deserted on the road, hung around until he got the story as told by the Indian fugitives, and (finding that his captain was dead) put a bold face on the matter and came in, bringing a horse he had been lucky enough to "capture" when its owner was not looking.

The next item is dated more than a year later; a year during which the wretched captives seem to have suffered miseries indescribable. The story bears the stamp of truth so far as the escaped fugitives knew it:

Turning to the latest muster-roll of the force, dated 1810, we identify among these survivors the names of Dyson Dyer, Nathan Edson, Paul Grummow, James Van Home, James Corbin and Phelim Corbin. Among the perished, August Mott, John Neads and Hugh Logan. To this sad list must be added four still more pitiable victims—the wife and unborn child of Phelim Corbin, and the unhappy Mrs. Neads, to whom death must have been welcome after seeing her little one "tied to a tree to keep it from following her and crying for victuals."

Mrs. John Kinzie, in a sketch of the life of her husband (Chic. Hist. Society, July 11, 1877. Fergus' Hist. Series No. 10) says:

There is good reason to believe that Mrs. Kinzie was mistaken in thinking that the coffins exposed on the lake shore by the action of the waves, contained the bodies of those who perished in the massacre. The fort burying-ground certainly was at the place indicated, and the exposed coffins doubtless contained the bodies of those buried in that ground; but that does not include the massacre victims. Mr. Fernando Jones believes them to have been buried at where Seventeenth Street, extended, would cross Prairie Avenue.

A letter on the matter (kindly furnished me while these pages are in preparation) reads as follows:

Fernando Jones.

No remains of any coffin were found, a fact which would indicate a battle-field burial; but on the other hand, it seems most improbable that the Indians would have left belt-plate, buttons and cloth on any of their victims.

The Indian Problem is solved at last, and by the Indians' own and only means for the solution of problems—the cutting of the knot. It has been a long struggle, marked by wrong on both sides and by shame on ours—theirs was not capable of shame. They had many friends and only one formidable enemy—themselves.

The Americans met them with the sword in one hand and the olive branch in the other. They declined the branch and defied the sword. The English offered them gifts in both hands, and they took all that was offered, rendering in exchange services disgraceful to the more civilized party to the contract. The French offered them love, and won theirs in return. While other whites held aloof, the gay Frenchman fraternized with them, became one with them, shared their lives and their pursuits, won their religious allegiance—nay, more; in a gentler and more irresistible way prevailed over them, for he formed with their women alliances which furnished the inferior race a hybrid, partly like themselves, but superior, and able and willing to be their leaders against the more grasping, less loving Americans. These hybrids have, in many cases, continued the race on its enlightened side, and there are not wanting among ourselves splendid specimens of manhood and womanhood, whose fine figures, flashing eyes, and strong, grave faces, proclaim the proud possession of the blood of the only really "first citizens" of our democratic republic.

It is now hard to trace the Indians who departed hence in 1835, fifty-eight years ago. They are almost "lost tribes." The report for 1890 of the Commissioners of Indian Affairs, gives Pottowatomies of various descriptions scattered in many places. This same is true of the Ottawas and Chippewas.

The larger part of the Pottowatomies (known of old as the "Woods Band," in contradistinction to the "Prairie Band") have renounced tribal relations and are known as the "Citizen Band." They number scarcely two thousand souls, and occupy a tract nearly thirty miles square (575,000 acres) in Oklahoma.

The Commissioners' report says but little about them, giving more attention to the "Prairie Band," since they are still a tribe, and thus, "wards of the nation." They number only 432, and hold in common 77,357 acres in Kansas, where they are doing fairly, but are pestered with the dregs of the "Citizen Band," who fall back on the tribe like the returned prodigal—but unrepentant, and still fit company only for the husk-eating swine.

Of the "Citizen Band," Special Agent Porter says:

"The Pottowatomies are citizens of the United States, thoroughly tinctured with white blood. Nearly all of them speak English and read and write. Some of them are quite wealthy, being good farmers, with large herds of stock. Their morals are below the standard, considering their advanced state as a civilized' people."

This is not high praise; still, it gives hope for better things. Peace and industry coming first, civilization and morality will follow. The savage Indian is essentially a being of the past (notwithstanding the survival of a few wild Apaches, a few "ghost-dancers" among the Sioux, and some other exceptional bodies) and he is succeeded by the truly civilized Indian (of whom the Cherokees are a splendid example), a self-respecting, self governing, self-educating, prosperous human being; not particularly different from the frontiers-man, except by a slight and diminishing shade of color and by the possession of the best characteristics of his savage ancestors. It may perhaps be said that no race of men has ever made as much progress in five generations as have the "civilized Indians." It is only one hundred and sixty years since d'Artaguiette, Vinsenne, the Jesuit Senat, and young St. Ange, son of the French commandant in the Illinois country (Fort Chartres), were defeated in the Arkansas country and were burned at the stake by the unconquered Chickasaws, who were "amazed to see the fortitude with which white men could die." And now, in the territory adjoining Arkansas on the west, the descendants of the torturers are cultivating farms, maintaining governments, courts, schools and churches, and in short, setting an example worthy to be followed by many who have been "civilized" from the time ages back of the year 1492; when the innocent, luckless Haytians learned of the existence of the unspeakable Spaniards, in cruelty the only rivals of the North American aborigines.

What is the reason for the intense interest and curiosity which clusters about this story of violence and rapine, of heroism, anguish and death? Other massacres have blotted with blood the pages of American history. From Deerfield and Schenectady to the Little Bighorn, our devoted bands have perished at the hands of the American Indian; and each dark day is suffered to rest as a mere tradition, buried in the half-forgotten folk-lore of its time and place. Why does the Fort Dearborn massacre, involving only a few score souls, hold a different rank in our hearts?

It is because the footsteps of millions are passing over the spot where it all happened; steamers are churning its peaceful waters; bells and steam-whistles are rending the air that bore away the sound of gun-shots, war-whoops and dying cries; and the sculptors' art is putting into immortal bronze the memory of its incidents. Thus does it gain an ex post facto importance and a posthumous fame.

Among the world's great cities, Chicago should be the one most thoroughly recorded. No other that counts her denizens by the million has among them those born before her annals fairly began. No other has had such startling vicissitudes. Laid low by slaughter in her infancy and by fire in her youth, she has climbed with bounding steps, upward and onward. Toiling, enduring, laughing, prospering, exulting; she has taken each scourge as a fillip to her energy, each spur as a stimulus to her courage. Hers is the enthusiasm of youth with the strength of maturity.

The early days of Paris and London are lost in half-mythical shadow. Even if told, their incidents might fail to match in interest those which have befallen their young sister. So much the more zealously should we who love this youthful aspirant for fame, take care that the romance of her childhood shall be preserved and handed down to posterity.

The spirited figure of La Salle (given by Lambert Tree) and Martin Ryerson's Indian group, are both fine memorials of the dawn of things in the North-West. Eli Bates's matchless statue of Lincoln is devoted to a page in the history of the whole Union. Now comes Chicago's latest treasure, the magnificent group commemorating the massacre of 1812; a purely civic work, to keep in the minds of Chicago's citizens, for untold generations, the romance and reality of her struggling infancy.

Honor to the men who, in the intense pressure of the present, still have thoughts for the past and the future.

At the unveiling, (1881) of the Block-House Tablet (designed by the Chicago Historical Society) set by William M. Hoyt in the north wall of his warehouse, facing Rush Street Bridge from the south, Mr. Eugene Hall read some stanzas of original verse so musical, so poetic and so apt for the occasion, that I venture (with his permission) to repeat them here, as a finish to our story.

FORT DEARBORN, CHICAGO, 1881.