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The Chicago Massacre of 1812: With Illustrations and Historical Documents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
[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.
[From Niles' Weekly Register, Saturday, April 13, 1813.]
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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