SATURDAY, AUGUST FIFTEENTH, 1812.

THE morning of Fort Dearborn's fatal day dawned bright and clear over Lake Michigan and the sandy flat. The "reveille" doubtless was sounded before sun-rise; and one can imagine the rattle of the drum and scream of the fife as they broke the dewy stillness and floated away, over the sand-spit and out on the lake; across the river to the Kinzie house and its outbuilding, the Ouillemette house; and up stream to the Indian encampments, large, dark and lowering. Quite possibly the tune then prescribed was the same as that now used for the drum-fife reveille, together with the words that have attached themselves to it of late years:

If this time-honored (and much hated) tune has come down to us from so long, the words had on that morning a significance even more perfect than that ordinarily belonging to them.

Early the company cooks must have been at work, boiling whole barrels of salt pork which had been in soak for days beforehand, and as much fresh beef as could possibly be used before spoiling. Bread had doubtless been baked and packed earlier in the week, and now all imaginable preparations for a march of nearly a month must be completed and the utensils packed and loaded into the company wagons. At each of the other, smaller households outside the fort similar toils and cares were going on. How were the lately weaned little ones to be cared for? Perhaps some parents hoped that they could drive their milch-cows with the caravan, seeing that grass was plenty and progress would be necessarily slow. What did the prospective mothers hope and fear? The wife of Phelim Corbin; how did she arm her soul for the month of rough travel, with the travail of child birth as one of its terrors?

Certainly the happiest of the crowd were the unconscious little ones, sure of love and care, full of hope and curiosity—a round dozen of them in one wagon, beginning the first journey of their innocent lives—the first and last. Fancy the mothers tucking them in! The eager little faces upturned for good-bye kisses!

All the workers might have spared themselves their trouble. If they were thinking of their cows, the crack of the Indian rifles soon ended that care. The food was enough and to spare; not a morsel of it did they ever eat. The journey of a month dwindled to a tramp of an hour; and as to the precious children—

Captain William Wells had come, with thirty friendly Indians (Miamis) to guard and help them through their long, lonely tramp to Detroit. He was a white man, the uncle of the commandant's young wife (Rebekah Wells Heald), but had been stolen when a boy by the Indians and brought up by them; had married a chief's daughter and had fought on their side until, years ago, this same young niece had gone to him and persuaded him to come back to his own kith and kin. So any fears the helpless settlers might have felt at first could now surely be put aside—Wells was so strong, so brave, so well acquainted with the Indians! He could doubtless keep them in order, either by policy or by force.

But if all was well, why had Captain Wells blackened his face—that is, put on the Indian sign of war and death—before starting that morning? All accounts agree that he did so, and usually it is taken as having been a sign of consciousness of impending death. Mrs. Helm[A] seems to have regarded it in this light. The question can never be settled, but to me it seems to have been an act of policy; an effort to identify himself with his Miamis and other friendly Indians. Wau-Bun adds the gruesome and almost incredible story that the start out was made to the music of the dead march! As Mrs. Helm was on horseback with the column she must have known, and we can but take her word for it.

The large herd of beef-cattle was left to the savages. This was probably the most precious gift of all put in their hands by the abandonment of the post. The liquor, if it had been left, would have been their bane, and the fire-arms the mere instruments of mutual destruction. The clothes must wear out, the flour be eaten up, the tools and furniture useless, the paints and gew-gaws a fleeting joy; but the herd! This would be self-sustaining, self-perpetuating, a perennial fount of blessing and mine of wealth. Here were food, clothing, shoes for this year and all years to come. No tribe or nation of their race had ever possessed such a treasure. How did they avail themselves of it? Wau-Bun answers:

No more characteristic bit of Indian painting has ever been made than that given in these few words. Here was the native savage (not ignorant of wiser ways, for he had had the thrifty white man under his eyes for four generations) still showing himself in sense a child, in strength a man, and in cruelty a fiend incarnate.

Mrs. Helm continues:

Unconsciously Mrs. Helm, in this artless tale told to glorify the younger officer, awakens in our minds a feeling of dislike for him. That a youth, scarce two years out of West Point, should add an ill-timed insult to the heavy cares of his senior officer, a soldier of thirteen years service, must be shocking to every one. Seeing that within two hours he was to die in action, bravely doing his duty (in company with his senior similarly engaged and sorely wounded) we can readily forgive his error, but not without a protest against a foolish woman's foolish effort to make it out a noble and praiseworthy outburst.

Mrs. Heald's narrative[B] (though fortified by Captain Heald's letter, quoted later) seems less probable than the foregoing circumstantial account in Wau-Bun. She says:

Captain Heald's force consisted of fifty-four regular soldiers and twelve militia-men, and with them departed every white inhabitant of the little settlement, men, women and children—probably about thirty in all—ranging in social condition from the prosperous Kinzies to the humble discharged soldiers who had married and started to make a living by tilling the soil, etc.

The Kinzie family was to go by boat, skirting along the lake and keeping in touch with the land column as long as it should hug the shore; later ascending the St. Joseph's River to "Bertrand," or "Parc-aux-vaches," as it was called, in memory of its having been the cow-pasture of the old French-Canadian settlement and fort which had stood on the bank of that river a century or so ago. The boat-party consisted of Mrs. John Kinzie, her son, John H., born at Sandwich, Canada, July 7, 1803, and her other children—Ellen Marion (later Mrs. Alexander Wolcott), born in Chicago, December, 1805; Maria Indiana (later Mrs. General Hunter), born in Chicago, in 1807, and Robert A., born in Chicago in 1810. Her daughter by a previous marriage, Margaret McKillip, was, it will be remembered, now the wife of Lieutenant Helm, and she bravely elected to share the perils of the land-march with her husband. There was also in the boat the nurse, Josette (misprinted in Wau-Bun, "Grutte"[C]) Laframboise (afterward Mrs. Jean Baptiste Beaubien), a clerk of Mr. Kinzie's, two servants, the boatman, and two Indians as guard. This shows that the boat must have been neither a bark canoe nor a common "dug-out" or "pirogue," but a large bateau, capable of carrying these numerous passengers, with corresponding baggage and supplies.

To-pee-nee-be, a friendly Indian, chief of the St. Joseph's band, early in the morning of the fatal day, had warned John Kinzie that trouble was to come from the "escort" which Captain Heald had bargained for with the Pottowatomies in council, and had urged him to go in the boat with his family. But the old frontiers-man was built of too sturdy stuff to take such advice. If there was to be danger he must share it, and if help would avail he must give it; so he rode with the column.

First rode out Captain William Wells, hero-martyr, marching, probably consciously, to a doom self-inflicted under the impulse of human sympathy and soldierly honor. Following him were half of his mounted escort of Miami Indians, followed in their turn by the volunteers and such of the regulars as were able to bear arms. Next came the short train of wagons, with stores, supplies, camp-equippage, women, children, sick, wounded and disabled. This little caravan contained all there was to show for eight years of industry and privation. But what mattered it? Greater savings would only have meant greater loss, and more men, women and children would only have meant more suffering and death.

The rear-guard was composed of the remainder of Captain Wells's wretched Miamis, such reliance as is a broken reed. The Miamis were mounted, as were Captain Wells, Mr. Kinzie, Mrs. Heald and Mrs. Helm, but probably no others of the party.

The day continued bright and sunny, and the line must have stretched from the fort (about the south end of Rush Street bridge) perhaps to the present Madison Street, half way to the point where began the sand-dunes or low hills which, even within the memory of the present generation, skirted the shores down as far as the beginning of the oak woods of Hyde Park. The bateau followed in the rear of the column and had just reached the mouth of the river (where the foot of Madison street now is[D]) when a messenger from To-pe-nee-be brought the Kinzie party to a halt.

The column had marched parallel with the Pottowatomie "escort" until both bodies reached the sand-hills. Then the whites kept by the shore-road, while the Indians, veering slightly to their right, put the sand-hills between their crowd and the slim, weak line of troops and wagons.

The reports of the fight itself, given by the two witnesses on whom we must rely, do not differ materially from each other. Mrs. Helm's narrative naturally treats more fully of the Kinzie family's experiences; Mrs. Heald's more fully of her own adventures and the death of her uncle. Neither woman mentions the other; they were probably separated early. I will give the stories in turn, beginning with Mrs. Helm's.

MARGARET HELM'S STORY.

Mrs. Helm does not say that she heard these words when uttered, nor is it probable that she could have been within hearing distance of the very head of the column, or even could have understood the words unless (what most unlikely) they were uttered in English. The whole circumstance looks apocryphal—probably a later Indian fabrication.

This seems to be the moment where her narrative diverges from that of Mrs. Heald, who evidently followed the troops, as she was caught between a cross-fire of the Indians, whom the advance had left on its flanks and rear, and there received her wounds. Mrs. Helm's subsequent narrative shows that she was, when rescued, unwounded and near the Like.

When we read this remarkable dialogue—remarkable as occurring amid the rattle of musketry on a battle-field where the narrators' friends were perishing in a hopeless struggle with an overpowering force of savage foes—we remember that Mrs. Kinzie's book did not assume to be history; was not written as a grave and literal record of things as they were; a statement carefully scrutinized to see that no unjust slur is cast upon any character, even so unimportant a one as the poor wounded, dying surgeon. Mrs. Helm, on the dreadful day, was a mere girl-wife of seventeen years, and was a woman of thirty-seven when Mrs. Kinzie transcribed the artless tale into Wau-Bun, a book which reads like a romance, and was meant so to be read.

The utterance of these admirable sentiments while still in sight of Ensign Ronan, mortally wounded, yet fighting with desperation on one knee, again puts us in doubt as to Mrs. Helm's location on the field; but the next part of her story shows that she was not far from the water.

This picturesque narrative of the rescue of a young bride by a friendly Indian, has been justly regarded as the one romantic story connected with that dark and bloody day. It has been the chosen theme of the story-teller, the painter and the sculptor, and its portrayal in perennial bronze forms the theme of the magnificent group which has been designed and modeled by the sculptor, Carl Rohl-Smith, cast in bronze, and presented (June, 1893), with appropriate ceremonies, to the Chicago Historical Society, "in trust for the city and for posterity" as set forth by an inscription on its granite base.[E]

Mrs. Helm goes on:

The disgrace attaching to the British government in seeking alliance with such savages in a war against civilized beings of its own race, is elsewhere fully treated. One can only wish that those cries might have reached the women of all England, instead of falling fruitlessly on those of one poor, exhausted, helpless American girl, and of the red hell-spawn grinning and dancing with delight at the sound.

Such is the tale as first given to the world by Mrs. Kinzie in "Wau-Bun." I will now present the narrative of the same struggle, defeat, surrender and massacre as often told by Mrs. Captain Heald to her son, the Hon. Darius Heald, and by him to me. The two are not, in essentials, contradictory; each completes and rounds out the other.

After giving the account of the peaceable start from the fort (inconsistent with Mrs. Helm's story, already quoted, and less truth-seeming than the latter), she goes on to say:

REBEKAH HEALD'S STORY.

Here to the eye of common-sense, whether soldierly or civilian, the battle is already gone—lost beyond salvation. The onus of blame appears to rest on poor Wells, the brave, devoted volunteer. He had learned war in a school that took no account of the supply-train; in the school of individual fighters, living on nothing, saving no wounded or non-combatants; dash, scurry, kill, scalp and run away, every man for himself—and the devil take the hindmost—in other words the Indian system. As to this band of whites, what had it to fight for but its train of wagons with all the helpless ones, all the stores, all the ammunition, all the means of progress and of caring for the wounded? To charge the centre of a brave, unformed rabble which outflanks you is only heroic suicide at best, and when the doing so leaves the train at the mercy of the spreading flanks of the foe, it is fatal madness.

To return to the Heald narrative:

By this time Wells, Ronan and Van Vorhees were killed, Heald had a bullet in his hip, Mrs. Heald had a half dozen wounds, half the regulars were killed or wounded, and so far as we now know for certain, all twelve militia-men. (A doubt about this last named unexplained mortality, and suggestion as to the probable manner of their death, will be noted later.) Darius Heald could only say:

In any circumstances, one cannot cast blame on a beaten commander, negotiating with his victorious foes, while bleeding from a bullet deep-bedded in his hip-joint. In this case, it is not likely that blame would be due, even if Captain Heald had been unhurt. But for his surrender, the Chicago Massacre would have been, on a small scale, the fore-runner of the great Custer slaughter, where not a white man lived to tell the tale. Every man, woman and child of white blood (except perhaps the Kinzies and Lieutenant Helm), would now be in oblivion almost as if they had never been born. Even the "massacre tree" that stands to-day (1893) in Eighteenth street near the lake, in gaunt, leafless old age, could only have been identified by the bleaching skulls, great and small, which surrounded it when General Cass passed the spot a few years afterward.

Here we take up again Mrs. Heald's personal story:

I have remarked that Mrs. Heald does not mention the presence of Mrs. Helm, nor does the latter that of the former. We judge from this, and from Mrs. Helm's account of her being saved by being plunged in the lake, that the latter remained nearer the shore than did the other.

DEATH OF CAPTAIN WELLS.

So nobly perished one of the best and bravest frontiers-men, fighting where he had been summoned by sympathy and affection, not by the orders of any superior officer. No knight ever set lance in rest under a more purely chivalric impulse than did this plain, pretending, half-educated pioneer. Two hundred and fifty miles away he had heard the warning note of peril, seen the fair young face of his brother's daughter (she who long before had sought him out among his savage captors and restored him to his kins-folk), and felt the impulse of manly self-devotion to save her and her friends from impending doom. He obeyed the noble impulse and—he died like a man, and somewhere beneath our thoughtless footsteps his bones lie buried.[F]

In the Calumet Club is preserved the identical hatchet worn by Captain Wells during the last fight, with authenticating documents furnished by James Madison Wolcott, of South Toledo, Ohio, his grandson by his wife Wa-nan-ga-peth (daughter of Me-che-kan-nah-quah or Little Turtle) through his daughter Ah-mah-qua-zah-quah ("A sweet breeze"), who married Judge James Wolcott. It is related that Wa-nan-ga-peth received the news of her husband's death from a stranger Indian who entered, told the message, laid down the hatchet in token of its truth, and departed, unknown as he came.

This narrative of the fight itself, as seen by Mrs. Heald and related to me by her son, is marked by a style of severe simplicity and good faith that seems to command confidence in the mind of the reader. There is no point in the artless story where one is compelled to pause and make a mental allowance for the bias of the narrator, for her excitement and the uncertainty such a state of mind might throw over her accuracy, or even for the errors (save those of omission) which the lapse of years might have caused. All seems natural, unforced and trustworthy. The story goes on:

Rebekah Wells Heald was evidently worthy of her name. Daughter of Captain Samuel Wells, niece of Captain William Wells, wife of Captain Nathan Heald, she was a woman whom the sight of blood could not daunt, the smart of wounds weaken, or the fear of bereavement subdue. (For many hours after the battle she supposed herself a widow.) Her son Darius (her mouthpiece in this narrative) was not born until nine years after that dreadful day; and now (1893), in his seventy-third year, he shows the family form and spirit. Tall, stalwart, erect and dignified, he is a typical southern-westerner, a mighty hunter in the past and a tower of patriarchal strength in his old age.

This horse was a thoroughbred, the same one that Mrs. Heald, as a bride, had ridden from Kentucky a year before. The Indians had always looked on it with envious eyes, and had employed all means, lawful and otherwise, to get it from the fort. Now it was theirs by conquest, and no later efforts availed to recover it. Doubtless among its new owners its fate was hard and its life short. One winter of starvation, exposure and abuse would "hang its hide on the fence," even while its wretched Indian-pony companions were living on in stubborn endurance.

Here arises before the mind's eye the dim and cloudy vision of horror, the acme of the tragedy, all the more appalling for its shrouding mystery. It makes the flesh creep and the hair stand on end. It sears the heart against the race whereof it was the inborn nature to feel in the eyes a love for the sight of mortal agony, in the ears an eagerness for the shriek of despairing anguish.

The wounded not included! The helpless picked out for torture! The inflamed hurts to be deepened with a pitchfork and perhaps further and mortally inflamed with a burning brand! Kindly Nature's passing lethargy to be quickened into conscious death in frantic anguish!

The twelve militia-men are never again mentioned. They are as if they had never been born, lived and toiled, never volunteered, never served, fought and fell. How is this to be accounted for? Why should their mortality be twice as great as that of the regulars? Darkness hides the answer; but it seems not unlikely that the same hellish ingenuity which held that "the wounded were not included," may also have held that men not wearing the uniform were not protected by the capitulation, and so they perished at the stake, surrounded by the "general frolic" which occupied the savages, good and bad, friendly and inimical, during the flight of the Healds and Kinzies.

There was no place on earth for a race which, through all its history, had found delight in the spectacle of pain, which inflicted torture, not as a means leading to some ulterior object, but as itself a source of joy and gladness. The race is still in existence, but the inhuman part of its characteristics are being refined away, leaving some of its best traits in the more advanced of its present representatives. Later on in this volume mention is made of its standing and its prospects at this time.

Now to take up again the Wau-Bun narrative. The torturing incident, already given, evidently ends the story of Mrs. Helm's personal experiences; all that follows being what others professed to have seen. Yet (possibly by typographical error) the quotation marks, which began with the narration, are continued much further on, including paragraphs wherein she is spoken of in the third person. (See later.) Mrs Helm says:

The Americans, after the first attack by the Indians, charged upon those who had concealed themselves in a sort of ravine intervening between the sand-banks and the prairie. The latter gathered themselves into a body, and after some hard fighting, in which the number of whites had become reduced to twenty-eight, this little band succeeded in breaking through the enemy and gaining a rising ground not far from the oak woods.

The contest now seemed hopeless, and Lieutenant Helm sent Peresh Leclerc, a half-breed boy in the service of Mr. Kinzie, who had accompanied the detachment and fought manfully on their side, to propose terms of capitulation. It was stipulated that the lives of all the survivors should be spared and a ransom permitted as soon as practicable.