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The Chicago Massacre of 1812: With Illustrations and Historical Documents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
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."
[Illustration: THE SECOND BLOCK-HOUSE IN ITS LAST DAYS.]
Mrs. John Kinzie, in a sketch of the life of her husband (Chic. Hist.
Society, July 11, 1877. Fergus' Hist. Series No. 10) says:
In 1816 the Kinzie family returned to their desolated home in
Chicago. The bones of the murdered soldiers, who had fallen four
years before, were still lying unburied where they had fallen. The
troops who rebuilt the fort collected and interred these remains.
The coffins which contained them were deposited near the bank of the
river, which then had its outlet about at the foot of Madison Street.
The cutting through the sand-bar for the harbor caused the lake to
encroach and wash away the earth, exposing the long range of coffins
and their contents, which were afterward cared for and reinterred by
the civil authorities.
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:
Upon my arrival in Chicago, in the spring of 1835, being fifteen
years of age, I became acquainted with a number of Indian and
half-breed boys, as well as older persons, and visited many times
the location of the Indian massacre of 1812. The spot was pointed
out by some who were children at the time, and by others who had
been informed by their parents. The burial-place where the victims
were interred was quite distinct at that time. There was a mound in
the prairie southwest of the massacre-ground, that was pointed out
as the grave of the vidette, or soldier in advance of the retreating
garrison.
The tradition was that the soldier ran west into the prairie,
thinking to hide in the tall grass, but was pursued and killed and
scalped and his body afterward buried by friendly half breeds.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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