The True Story of the Deadly Encounter at Fort Dearborn
For nearly two centuries, the events that transpired in Chicago on August 15, 1812, had been known as the Fort Dearborn Massacre. With the dedication of a new park, the bloody encounter between 95 soldiers and settlers and some 500 Potawatomi has been recast as the Battle of Fort Dearborn. What really happened on that hot August morning in Chicago 197 years ago?
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At nine o’clock on the morning of August 15, 1812, a hot and sunny Saturday, a motley column paraded out of Fort Dearborn. Leading the way was William Wells, mounted on a giant thoroughbred, and 15 of his Miami, riding ponies so small that their feet almost scraped the ground. A onetime captain in the U.S. Army, Wells was likely wearing his old blue uniform jacket. Remembering his Miami heritage, he had painted his face black, like a warrior prepared for battle—and for death.
Behind Wells followed 55 soldiers, 12 civilian militiamen, 9 women, and 18 children. Some of the women were on horseback, and most of the children rode in one of the two wagons. The remaining Miami brought up the rear. Two fifers and two drummers played a tune that time has forgotten—although it seems preposterous that those desperate musicians would have been so tone-deaf as to perform the Dead March, as Juliette Kinzie reports.
In 1812, the main branch of the Chicago River did not follow a straight course into Lake Michigan. Instead, just east of the fort, it curved south (to near modern-day Madison Street) and then emptied into the lake. It’s also important to recall that the lake’s shoreline was then much closer to what is now Michigan Avenue. After the column left the fort, accompanied by the Potawatomi, it marched south along the river and shoreline, following a course that today would have lain a little east of Michigan Avenue. Around what is presently Roosevelt Road, a series of low sand dunes sprang up, separating the shoreline from the prairie. At this point the troops from Fort Dearborn kept to the shoreline, while the 500 or so Potawatomi kept to the west side of the dunes, where they were mainly hidden from view.
What occurred next happened hurriedly. Swinging his hat around his head, Wells rode back to the main column shouting that the Potawatomi were about to attack. Captain Heald ordered his troops to charge, and the soldiers gamely scurried up the dunes with bayonets pointed, breaking the Potawatomi line. (Simon Pokagon criticized the whites because they “rushed headlong through [the Potawatomi] lines before a bow was bent or a gun was fired,” but he’s alone in making this charge; even John N. Low acknowledges that the Potawatomi had gathered in ambush.) The Potawatomi fell back, allowed the soldiers in, and enveloped them on their flanks. Eventually the soldiers retreated to the shoreline, making a defensive stand on a high piece of ground. By then, the 30 Miami had fled.
The soldiers’ charge had led them away from the wagons, and there it was, writes Quaife, that “the real massacre occurred.” Even Pokagon, who insisted that the Potawatomi were only fighting a patriotic battle for their homeland, regretted what happened there, where, as he writes in Harper’s, “the Angel of Mercy seems to have been asleep.” Hundreds of Potawatomi surrounded the wagons, which were defended by the 12-man militia, desperate to protect their wives and children. The men discharged their muskets and then wielded them like clubs before they were all slain. A solitary Potawatomi climbed into the wagon with the children and indiscriminately bludgeoned them to death with his tomahawk—“for which he was hated by the tribe ever after,” writes Pokagon.
From the bloody melee, two incidents, essentially grounded in fact, emerge. Aware of the slaughter at the wagons, Wells rushed to the aid of the women and children. (Another account, told by Pokagon and others, had Wells rushing back to the Potawatomi camp intent on revenge.) Overcome by sheer numbers, he never made it, though his bravery earned the hyperbolic admiration of Pokagon. “[Wells] fought one hundred or more single-handed, on horseback,” he writes, “shooting them down on right and left, in front and rear, until his horse fell under him and he was killed.” One Potawatomi took Wells’s scalp, while another cut out his heart, divided it into small pieces, and distributed them among the other warriors. Honoring their slain antagonist and hoping to imbibe a little of his courage, the warriors consumed the heart of William Wells.
Then a Potawatomi—Pokagon says it was the same warrior who had tomahawked the children in the wagon—attacked Margaret Helm, the wife of the fort’s lieutenant. As the two grappled, a second Potawatomi stepped in, seized Mrs. Helm, and dragged her down to the lake, where he proceeded to drown her. Or so it appeared. In fact the warrior was Black Partridge, and the pretend drowning was a ruse to save Mrs. Helm’s life.
It must have seemed like an eternity, but only about 15 minutes had passed. The battlefield grew quiet. Captain Heald, seriously wounded—he would walk with a cane the rest of his life—agreed to parlay with the Potawatomi, who were led by a chief named Black Bird. After receiving promises that survivors would be spared, Heald agreed to surrender. By Quaife’s count, 67 people had lost their lives: Wells, 25 regular soldiers, the 12 militiamen, 12 children, 15 Potawatomi, and 2 women, including Mrs. Heald’s black slave, Cicely. (Though wounded, Rebekah Heald survived the battle.) The victorious warriors led their captives back to the fort and, that night, tortured to death several badly wounded soldiers. There may have been some confusion as to whether soldiers already near death were included in the surrender agreement.
On the morning of the 16th, the Potawatomi divided up the captives, set fire to the fort, and dispersed. Some of the whites would die among their captors, but most of them were eventually ransomed and returned to their families. (Protected by her mother, who was forced to run a gauntlet between club-wielding Potawatomi women and children, six-month-old Susan Simmons survived. She died in California in 1900, the battle’s last survivor.)
Four years later, when soldiers arrived at Chicago to build a second Fort Dearborn, the bleached bones of the battle’s dead still lay unburied on the Lake Michigan shoreline.
This article appears in the December 2009 issue of Chicago magazine.
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I enjoyed your article on the Fort Dearborn Massacre. I have read extensively on the subject in recent months in order to compile a detailed and accurate history of my ancestor, Susannah Millhouse Simmons, a survivor of this historic event. Though she managed to save herself and her infant child (Susan Simmons Winans), her young son and husband fell victim that day.
I have followed articles about the controversy of the naming of the park with great interest. I find it ridiculous that Chicago's history is allowed to be distorted to mollify those who want to stand in the way of truth.
Who is John N. Low and why should we care what he thinks? Why should the statue that honors Black Partridge be warehoused when he valiantly saved a white woman from being killed? It's because some Native Americans still see him as a traitor for doing so. Isn't that a sad commentary that any American would still feel that way today?
Nearly 200 years have passed, but time doesn't change facts. The American public is sick to death of political correctness getting in the way of truth. It's time to tell it like it is and stop catering to fringe groups who want to retell history to their own satisfaction.
Were there any descendents of the victims of the Fort Dearborn Massacre on this board that decided the name of the park? I doubt it. I'm surprised our government hasn't apologized for building the fort there in the first place. Maybe that's next.
Nancy Margraff
Chicago
I will have to agree. I know the Americans did horrible things to the Inidans. However, the Indians I am sure did horrible things to others too. For example, do you think the Aztecs and Inca politely asked other tribes to move off of their land?
Correcting false history is one thing, re"writing" it is another. I agree with the name Battle of Fort Dearborn Park. I will accept that. However, how can it ever be justified to kill innocent children from an Indian, whiteman , or any race. Erasing statues reminds me of something Stalin would have done?
Our country is always looking for the "boogyman". First it was the Indiand who was evil, then the Blackman who was evil, now it's the whiteman who is evil. Moral superiority does not exist....and any hint towards it is a dangerous path to take!!
I say keep the old statue up, but educate Children about how both sides benefited our country.
Ok sorry for the rant!!!
As usual ashamed at the ignorance of white folk. I think Simon Pokagon put it best, "It is true that the Indian retaliated, and was in many cases the aggressor, if we can call people the aggressors who object to having their native land taken from them by aliens."
"Of the savagery and brutality exhibited by the Indian in many cases, I would merely observe that it is manifestly unfair to judge them by the standards of a people who have enjoyed Christian civilization for many centuries and who have behind them the lessons and warnings, the glory and the gloom of Roman, Grecian, Syrian, Chaldean, and Egyptian civilizations. Moreover, if one calls to mind the methods which marked the terrible religious struggle of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries in Europe, and will remember how human ingenuity was taxed to its utmost to devise methods of horrible torture which were remorselessly meted out by those claiming to be Christians to others claiming to be Christians, he will, I think, feel it wisest to pass very lightly over the charge of excessive cruelty on the part of those he flippantly terms savages. Had the Indian submitted more tamely he would have been characterized by this same self-engrossed class, who delight in echoing the brutally false phrase that "there is no good Indian but a dead Indian," as cowardly and unworthy of the land which for unnumbered generations had been the land of his fathers."
"An Interesting Representative of a Vanishing Race"
The Arena 16
B. O. Flower
Arena Publishing Co.
Boston, MA
July, 1896
Published: July, 1896
bohzo (hello)
I do not want to sound angry or argumentative but what happened to Native Americans was not just 200 years ago. My grandmother was sent to a Indian boarding school in the early 1930's, she was taken from her family to learn the ways of the whites. It traumatized her until her death, it followed my mother and still follows me.
You can't erase what happened, it was and is part of your history and my life. My grandmother was beat for speaking the only language that she knew, when she grew up she carried a fear that she could not or would not speak her native tongue. She actually would stop speaking to other native elders when I would enter a room. I realize that it is because of what happened when they were young, so when you have an attitude of 200 years ago get over it, I can't help but wounder if you could step into the life of a Native American would you think in a different way? Do you even know any real Native Americans? Have you ever met a real Native American? We just want to be left alone and in peace, the same as your 200 years ago.
For the record I know of this John Low, he is a very smart and humble man who loves his culture and people, that is why he speaks.
What's being discussed is people. Homo sapiens behaves the same the world over and throughout time.
When Cortéz arrived in Mexico, the Tlaxcalans helped him, because they hated the Mexíca (Aztecs) who had enslaved all of the countryside around Tenochtitlán that their military could manage to subdue.
The Tlaxcalans were wearing clothing made of woven mats, according to Díaz's diary of the conquest -- because the Mexíca forced the subdued tribes to surrender all their cotton to them.
And so people behaved like they always do and helped an invader, because it was to their advantage.
Geoffrey Johnson deserves credit for re-telling in a short space and with helpful illustrations the story of what happened at Fort Dearborn. Certainly the most popular version, Juliette Kinzie's Wau-Bun, is lively reading but highly unreliable. Milo Quaife's account is far more valuable, and better yet he collected most of the primary sources in his volume Chicago and the Old Northwest. Pokagon's account is of interest, but not nearly as solid as a few accounts written immediately after the battle. His description of Wells's fighting a hundred Indians single-handed is "hyperbolic" as Johnson notes; Kinzie and other romancers credit Wells with killing more Powawatomi than died in the entire battle (Johnson's estimate of 15 is too high). The word "massacre" is not a misnomer (there was an ambush of a force that had surrendered and women and children were killed indiscriminately), but it is also true that when settlers "massacred" Native Americans, as at Gnatenhutten and Sand Creek, that word is not used. Those interested in more information about this battle might read two recent novels, William Heath's Blacksnake's Path: The True Adventures of William Wells, and Jerry Crimmens, Fort Dearborn.
Interesting a bus load of Potawatomi will be coming from Sarnia Ontario Canada. Plan on visiting Chicago no particular agenda dates are from 28 August 2011 to 01 September 2011.
I personally am interested in the location of the Chicago Ft Dearborn Massacre.
We will be staying at the Embassy Suites. I would be delighted if contacted.
I will be regristered under my name Winston Williams. My screen name was our orginal surname.
My parents both attended Residential School at Muncey Ontario Canada. Both died before monies were paid out to survivors only. I attended Native day school up until 1953 then the Native Community were put into the Sarnia Schools.
I would like to apologize on behalf of the Potawatomi for any blood shed uncalled for Forgiveness brings relief for prayers to be answered.
Interesting a bus load of Potawatomi will be coming from Sarnia Ontario Canada. Plan on visiting Chicago no particular agenda dates are from 28 August 2011 to 01 September 2011.
I personally am interested in the location of the Chicago Ft Dearborn Massacre.
We will be staying at the Embassy Suites. I would be delighted if contacted.
I will be regristered under my name Winston Williams. My screen name was our orginal surname.
My parents both attended Residential School at Muncey Ontario Canada. Both died before monies were paid out to survivors only. I attended Native day school up until 1953 then the Native Community were put into the Sarnia Schools.
I would like to apologize on behalf of the Potawatomi for any blood shed uncalled for Forgiveness brings relief for prayers to be answered.
From the Providence Gazette, Oct. 10, 1812 page 2
Above the following article is stated:
Mr. Greely is a "Republican" attached to the present administration, and one of its officers. He too is a man of truth and honour. etc.....
ATTACK ON FORT DEARBORN
Mr. Greely states the following facts, respecting the capture of Fort Dearborn (Chicauga) The assailants were all Indians. The garrison capitulated with them that they should spare the lives of the garrison, who were to have as much of the arms, ammunition, provisions &c. as they could carry away. But, the Indians finding that in the night Capt. Wells, who had come from Fort Wayne to conduct the garrison to that place, had ordered a quantity of powder and ball to be thrown into the Chicauga river, the Indians became incensed, fired upon the garrison as they marched out of the fort, killed Capt. Wells, and wounded Capt. Heels and his lady; whose lives were saved by a Mr. Burnett, an Indian trader, who claimed them as friends, and offered to purchase their ransom. Capt. H. and his lady are now at St. Joseph's with Mr. Burnett. Mr. Greely had this information from a Pattawatimie chief, who came to Fort Dearborn, to assist the garrison, but was compelled by the hostile Indians to join them.