The Chicago Massacre of 1812: With Illustrations and Historical DocumentsKirkland, Joseph
History
The Chicago Massacre of 1812: With Illustrations and Historical Documents
Kirkland, Joseph
Chicago (Ill.) -- History; Fort Dearborn Massacre, Chicago, Ill., 1812
Yours,
G. S. Hubbard.
Mr. Hubbard does not say he remembers having seen the grave. He did not
come to Chicago to live until 1836. Judge Blodgett, as we shall see
hereafter, describes its position as not on the river bank, but back in
the timber.
A somewhat different account of the affair was given by Mrs. Porthier
(Victoire Mirandeau,) and printed in Captain Andreas' History of
Chicago, Vol. II, page 105.
My sister Madeline and I saw the fight between John Kinzie and
Lalime, when Lalime was killed. It was sunset, when they used to
shut the gates of the fort. Kinzie and Lalime came out together,
and soon we heard Lieutenant Helm call out for Mr. Kinzie to look
out for Lalime, as he had a pistol. Quick we saw the men come
together. We heard the pistol go off and saw the smoke. Then they
fell down together. I don't know as Lalime got up at all, but Kinzie
got home pretty quick. Blood was running from his shoulder, where
Lalime had shot him. In the night he packed up some things and my
father took him to Milwaukee, where he stayed until his shoulder
got well and he found he would not be troubled if he came back. You
see, Kinzie wasn't to blame at all. He didn't have any pistol nor
knife--nothing. After Lalime shot him and Kinzie got his arms around
him, he (Lalime) pulled out his dirk, and as they fell he was stabbed
with his own knife. That is what they all said. I didn't see the
knife at all. I don't remember where Lalime was buried. I don't think
his grave was very near Kinzie's house. I don't remember that Mr.
Kinzie ever took care of the grave. That is all I know about it. I
don't know what the quarrel was about. It was an old one--business, I
guess.
This bears all the thumb-marks of truth. It comes at first hand from a
disinterested eye-witness. Even if we suppose Mrs. Kinzie to have seen
the affray, which she does not say, it was doubtless from the opposite
side of the river, while Victoire and her sister were in the fort
itself. No other account, direct from an eye-witness, has ever been
published.
Now, without pretending to certainty, it strikes me as probable that
up to this time Kinzie stood on the Indian side of the irrepressible
conflict between white men and red men, while the army and Lalime took
the other. Mrs. Helm's narrative in Wau-Bun is decidedly hostile to
the good sense of the commandant of the fort, and even to the courage
of some of his faithful subordinates, while obviously friendly to the
mutinous element in his command. Therefore it seems to me quite likely
that Lalime's crazy attack on Kinzie was not entirely disconnected with
that irrepressible conflict, that this long-standing quarrel had more
than appears on the surface to do with the admitted success of Kinzie's
trade and the well-known unprofitableness of the business carried on by
the government agency.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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