CHAPTER XXXVIII

Famine--Day-kau-ray's Daughter--Noble Resolution of a Chief-- Bread for the hungry--Rev. Mr. Kent--An Escaped Prisoner--The Cut-Nose Again--Leave-taking with Our Red Children--Departure from Fort Winnebago 380

Appendix 387

Notes--By Reuben Gold Thwaites 393

Index 421

ILLUSTRATIONS

PAGE

Juliette A. McGill Kinzie Frontispiece From oil portrait by G. P. A. Healy, painted in 1855.

John Harris Kinzie xvi From copy of oil portrait by G. P. A. Healy, painted by Daisy Gordon, in possession of Chicago Historical Society.

Title-Page to the Orginal Edition xxiii

Michilimackinac 6 From sketch by Capt. S. Eastman, U. S. A., in Schoolcraft's "Indian Tribes," vol. iv., p. 188.

Fort Howard in 1855 14 From daguerreotype in possession of Wisconsin Historical Society.

Four-Legs' Village 42 Entrance to Winnebago Lake (the present town of Neenah). From sketch by Mrs. Kinzie, in original edition.

Fort Winnebago in 1831 56 From sketch by Mrs. Kinzie, in original edition.

A Typical Group of Winnebagoes 64 From photograph in possession of Wisconsin Historical Society.

Chicago in 1820 140 From sketch by H. R. Schoolcraft, in "Indian Tribes," vol. iv., p. 192.

Chicago in 1831 142 From sketch by Mrs. Kinzie in original edition.

Map of Chicago in 1830 142 (Original by James Thompson destroyed in Chicago fire, October 9, 1871.) From copy thereof, in possession of Chicago Historical Society.

Mark Beaubien 144 From crayon portrait in possession of Chicago Historical Society.

The Chicago Portage 146 From the first U. S. Government Survey of the region of the portage and site of Chicago, in possession of Chicago Historical Society.

Residence of John Kinzie, Esq. 150 (The first house built in Chicago.) From sketch by Mrs. Kinzie, in original edition.

Old Fort Dearborn, 1803-1812 156 From sketch by Charles H. Ourand, based upon plans drawn by Capt. J. Whistler, 1808, in possession of Chicago Historical Society.

Shaubena 198 (Chief of the Pottawattomies.) From photograph of oil portrait in possession of Chicago Historical Society.

Big Foot's Village and Lake 250 From sketch by Mrs. Kinzie, in original edition.

The Grand Chûte--Fox River 346 From sketch by Mrs. Kinzie, in original edition.

Black Hawk 354 (Head-man of the Rock River Sacs.) From oil portrait by R. M. Sully, in possession of Wisconsin Historical Society.

Fort Winnebago in 1834 353 (Indian agency buildings on hill to left.) From oil painting, based upon plans and local traditions, by Isaac A. Ridgway.

EDITOR'S INTRODUCTION

The early history of Chicago has much to do with the Kinzies and their connections. It is particularly fortunate that one of this family should have given to the world, out of the abundance of her recollections of the "early day," what has become a classic in the historical literature of the Middle West--the Northwest of a half-century ago.

Kinzie is but an abbreviated form of the old Scotch name of Mackenzie. John Mackenzie must have been among the first subjects of Great Britain to emigrate to Canada upon the downfall of the French regime; for his son John (afterwards called Kinzie) was born in Quebec, in 1763, the year of the Paris treaty. The family soon moved to Detroit, and there the elder Mackenzie died, during John's infancy.

The widow had previously been married to a Mr. Haliburton, by whom she had a daughter, a beautiful and accomplished girl, who in turn became the mother of General Fleming, Nicholas Low, and Mrs. Charles King, of New York. John Kinzie was the only issue of the second marriage. In due time, Mrs. Mackenzie married a third husband--William Forsyth, another Scotchman, who had come to New York in 1750, fought under Wolfe on the Plains of Abraham, and was twice wounded. The Forsyths moved to New York City, whither young John Kinzie was taken. When some ten or eleven years of age, while at school at Williamsburg, on Long Island, with two of his half-brothers, Kinzie, a restless, adventurous youth, ran away to his native town, Quebec. There he was, when nearly starved, picked up on the streets by a silversmith, and incidentally learned something of the craft of his benefactor. There are evidences of his being in Detroit, as a fur-trader, as early as 1795; and by the close of the century this thrifty young Scotchman is known to have had trading establishments on the Maumee, at Sandusky, and at St. Josephs, on Lake Michigan.

Young Kinzie's life had been a continual romance, but it was no less so than that of his first love. During one of the numerous forays over the Virginia border, made by the Shawanese during Lord Dunmore's War (1774), a band of these barbarians swooped down upon the rude cabin of Isaac McKenzie, who had established himself at the junction of Wolf's Creek with the Kanawha River. McKenzie's wife was killed, but their two young and beautiful children, Margaret and Elizabeth, were borne away to the great Shawanee town of Chillicothe, in what is now Ohio. Here, in accordance with Indian custom, the girls were adopted into the family of a chief, one of whose squaws was assigned to their tender rearing.

After eighteen years, when Margaret had developed into a young woman of rare loveliness, she accompanied her foster-father upon a hunting expedition to the vicinity of the present Fort Wayne, in Indiana. A young Shawanee chief, present at the hunt, paid mad suit to this forest beauty; but, still pining for civilization, she scorned her Indian lover, and he set out to take her by force, as had ever been among his people the custom of rejected suitors. At midnight, as the nomadic village was echoing with the din made by the chief's followers, who were preparing to assist in this intended capture of a wife, Margaret silently stole from her wigwam, for it was a case in which custom decreed that she must rely solely upon herself, and took refuge in the depths of the forest. Her persistent lover was close at her heels. She ordered her faithful dog to attack him, and while man and brute were engaged in savage combat, flew through the woods to the stockade where the ponies were kept. Leaping on the back of a favorite, Margaret plied him with rope-end and voice, through seventy-five miles of wilderness, all the way to her barbaric home in Chillicothe, where the poor animal dropped dead. Here, at last, she was safe from her lover's attentions.

Not long after Margaret's thrilling experience, the two girls were taken to Detroit by their foster-father, who proudly showed them to his white friends. The old chief, however, recked not of the power of love. A Scotchman named Clark became enamoured of Elizabeth, and John Kinzie saw in Margaret his heart's desire. The two couples mated in Indian fashion, and lived together in the woods for some five years--Elizabeth bearing two children, and Margaret three (William, James, and Elizabeth).

When the strength of Indian power in the country north-west of the Ohio River was at last broken in the decisive battle at the Fallen Timbers, followed by the treaty of Greenville (1795), and in another year by the removal of British garrisons from the posts on the upper lakes, communication was again possible between the American colonists and the Northwest. Isaac McKenzie heard of the presence of his daughters in the Michigan wilderness, and in his old age laboriously worked his way thither to visit them. There was a pathetic reunion; and when the white-haired frontiersman went back to Virginia, Margaret and Elizabeth, declining the legal marriage proffered by their consorts, followed him to the old home, Margaret leaving her children to be cared for by their father.

Elizabeth in due course legally married a Virginian named Jonas Clybourn, and Margaret also legally united domestic fortunes with one Benjamin Hall of that state. Sons of these second unions eventually came to Chicago, and took prominent parts in the drama of pioneer life in Illinois and Wisconsin.

In 1800, John Kinzie married Eleanor (Lytle) McKillip, the widow of a British officer, who had had by him a daughter named Margaret. The Kinzies, with their infant son, John Harris (born at Sandwich, Ontario, July 7, 1803), apparently settled at Chicago in the spring of 1804, John Kinzie being the trader at Fort Dearborn, then just constructed. Kinzie was also appointed sub-Indian agent, and later was a government interpreter. His connection with the massacre at Fort Dearborn, in 1812, is best related in _Wau-Bun_ itself. In 1823, he was appointed a justice of the peace; in 1825, agent at Chicago for the American Fur Company; he died at Chicago in 1828, aged sixty-five. His four children by Eleanor were: Jolm Harris (1803), Ellen Marion (1805), Maria Indiana (1807), and Robert Allen (1810). His two children by Margaret McKenzie were tenderly reared by Mrs. Kinzie, who, before her marriage, had been fully informed of the circumstance of the earlier union under the forest code of the day.

It is with John Harris Kinzie that our immediate interest lies. His early youth was spent in Chicago; he was nine years of age at the time of the massacre in 1812; during the next four years the family remained in Detroit, only returning to Chicago when (1816) the former town was captured by General Harrison; in 1818, he was sent to Mackinac to be apprenticed to the American Fur Company. Carefully trained to the conduct of the fur trade, then the principal commercial interest in the Northwest, young Kinzie was sent, in 1824, to Prairie du Chien, where he learned the Winnebago language and thereof partly constructed a grammar. Two years later, we find him installed as private secretary to Governor Lewis Cass, in whose company he assisted in making numerous treaties with the aborigines. It was while in this service that he went to Ohio to study the language and habits of the Wyandots, of whose tongue he also compiled a grammar. His remarkable proficiency in Indian languages led to his appointment, in 1829, as Indian agent to the Winnebagoes, at Fort Winnebago (Portage, Wisconsin). Upon the death of his father, he fell heir to the Winnebago name, "Shawneeaukee," which appears so frequently in the text of _Wau-Bun_.

August 9, 1830, Kinzie--now styled "Colonel" by courtesy, because of his office as Indian agent--was married at Middletown, Connecticut, to Juliette A. Magill, the authoress of the book of which this is a new edition. Very little has been garnered concerning the early life of Miss Magill. She was born in Middletown, September 11, 1806, but appears to have lived much in the national metropolis, and to have enjoyed a wide and intimate acquaintance with the "best families" of the city; her education was certainly not neglected.

The honeymoon of the young pair was in part spent in New York City. They were at Detroit a few weeks after the wedding, however, and thence took the steamer "Henry Clay" for Green Bay. The text of _Wau-Bun_ commences with the departure from Detroit, and carries us forward to their arrival at Green Bay, and later at Fort Winnebago; their horseback trip to Chicago, the following March, is also interestingly described. They appear to have permanently made their home in Chicago in 1834.

In 1841, Colonel Kinzie was appointed registrar of public lands; seven years later, he was canal collector at Chicago, occupying the position until President Lincoln commissioned him as a paymaster in the Union army, with the rank of major. He was still holding this office when, in the early summer of 1865, being in failing health, he went to Pennsylvania in company with his wife and son, but died in a railway carriage near Pittsburg, upon the 21st of June. His widow, two sons, and a daughter survived him; together with the reputation among his contemporaries of possessing a lovable, sympathetic soul, broad enough to appreciate the many good traits of the commonly despised savage, concerning whom he knew more than most men.

Mrs. Kinzie's death came upon September 15, 1870, while spending the season at Amagansett, on Long Island, New York. She had sent to a druggist for some quinine, but through inadvertence he instead sent morphine, in the taking of which she lost her life. The heroine of _Wau-Bun_, besides wielding a graceful pen and a facile pencil, was a woman with marked domestic virtues, and in every walk of life a charming character.

The first public appearance of Mrs. Kinzie as an author was in 1844, when there appeared from the press of Ellis & Fergus, Chicago, an octavo pamphlet of thirty-four pages, with a plate, entitled _Narrative of the Massacre at Chicago, August 15, 1812, and of Some Preceding Events_. This publication was anonymous; but as it bore the name of John H. Kinzie as the holder of the copyright, most readers assumed that he was the author. In time, it came to be known that his wife had written the work. The footnote to the opening page of chapter xviii of _Wau-Bun_ (page 155 of our text) says that her story of the massacre was first published in 1836; but apparently no copies of this early publication are now extant. Mrs. Kinzie's narrative was of course obtained from first hands, her husband and other members of her family having been witnesses of the tragedy; it has been accepted by the historians of Illinois as substantially accurate, and other existing accounts are generally based upon this. With slight variation, the contents of the pamphlet were transferred to the pages of _Wau-Bun_, of which they constitute chapters xviii, xix, and xx.

_Wau-Bun_ itself first appeared in 1856 (8vo, pp. 498), from the press of Derby & Jackson, New York. A second edition was published in 1857, by D. B. Cooke & Co., of Chicago, the same plates being used, with nothing changed but the title-page. Very likely it was printed by Derby & Jackson, in New York, for the Chicago booksellers named--a familiar device with the publishing trade. A third edition, an entire reset, in cheap duodecimo form, without illustrations, was published in 1873 by J. B. Lippincott & Co., Philadelphia (pp. 390). The Lippincotts had, in 1869, the year before her death, published a novel by Mrs. Kinzie, entitled _Walter Ogilby_, which apparently had a fair sale; and their reprint of _Wau-Bun_, which by this time had become scarce and out of copyright, was no doubt made to still further cultivate a market created by the novel. Even this reprint is now rare.

_Wau-Bun_ gives us our first, and in some respects our best, insight into the "early day" of the old Northwest.[A] The graphic illustrations of early scenes which the author has drawn for us are excellent of their kind, indicating an artistic capacity certainly unusual upon the American frontier of seventy years ago. But better than these is the text itself. The action is sufficiently rapid, the description is direct, and that the style is unadorned but makes the story appear to us the more vivid. Upon her pages we seem to see and feel the life at the frontier military stockades, to understand intimately the social and economic relations between the savages and the government officials set over them, to get at the heart of things within the border country of her day. It is the relation of a cultivated eye-witness, a woman of the world, who appreciates that what she depicts is but a passing phase of history, and deserves preservation for the enlightenment of posterity. Many others have, with more or less success, written narratives within the same field; Mrs. Kinzie herself occasionally trips upon dates and facts, and sometimes she deliberately glosses where the antiquarian would demand recital of naked circumstance; but take _Wau-Bun_ by large and small, and it may safely be said that to students of the history of the Middle West, particularly of Illinois and Wisconsin, Mrs. Kinzie has rendered a service of growing value, and of its kind practically unique.

[Footnote A: Similar reminiscences, almost as excellent in their way, but more limited in scope, are: Mrs. Charlotte Ouisconsin Van Cleve's _Three Score Years and Ten_ (Minneapolis, 1888), and Elizabeth Thérèse Baird's articles in vols, xiv and xv, _Wisconsin Historical Collections_.]

It is fitting that the Caxton Club should publish a new edition of this early Chicago classic, with the needed accessories of notes, index, and additional illustrations. The book deserves to be better known of the present generation, who will find in it a charming if not fascinating narrative, giving them an abiding sense of the wonderful transformation which seventy years have wrought in the development of the Old Northwest.

The present writer has selected the illustrations and furnished the Notes, Introduction, and Index to this edition, and exercised a general oversight of its make-up; to others, however, have been left, by the Caxton Club, the responsibility for the proof-reading of the text.

Mrs. Eleanor Kinzie Gordon, of Savannah, Ga., a daughter of Colonel and Mrs. John H. Kinzie, has kindly read the proof-sheets of Introduction and Notes, and offered several valuable suggestions, which have been gratefully incorporated in the text.

R. G. T.

Madison, Wis., October, 1901.

[** Reproduction of Original Cover

WAU-BUN,

THE

"EARLY DAY"

IN

THE NORTH-WEST.

BY MRS. JOHN H. KINZIE,

OF CHICAGO.

With Illustrations.

NEW YORK: PUBLISHED BY DERBY & JACKSON, 119 NASSAU STREET. CINCINNATI: H. W. DERBY & Co. 1856.]

PREFACE

Every work partaking of the nature of an autobiography, is supposed to demand an apology to the public. To refuse such a tribute, would be to recognize the justice of the charge, so often brought against our countrymen--of a too great willingness to be made acquainted with the domestic history and private affairs of their neighbors.

It is, doubtless, to refute this calumny that we find travellers, for the most part, modestly offering some such form of explanation as this, to the reader: "That the matter laid before him was, in the first place, simply letters to friends, never designed to be submitted to other eyes, and only brought forward now at the solicitation of wiser judges than the author himself."

No such plea can, in the present instance, be offered. The record of events in which the writer had herself no share, was preserved in compliance with the suggestion of a revered relative, whose name often appears in the following pages. "My child," she would say, "write these things down, as I tell them to you. Hereafter our children, and even strangers will feel interested in hearing the story of our early lives and sufferings." And it is a matter of no small regret and self-reproach, that much, very much, thus narrated was, through negligence, or a spirit of procrastination, suffered to pass unrecorded.

With regard to the pictures of domestic life and experience (preserved, as will be seen in journals, letters, and otherwise), it is true their publication might have been deferred until the writer had passed away from the scene of action; and such, it was supposed, would have been their lot--that they would only have been dragged forth hereafter, to show to a succeeding generation, what "The Early Day," of our Western homes had been. It never entered the anticipations of the most sanguine that the march of improvement and prosperity would, in less than a quarter of a century, have so obliterated the traces of "the first beginning," that a vast and intelligent multitude would be crying out for information in regard to the early settlement of this portion of our country, which so few are left to furnish.

An opinion has been expressed, that a comparison of the present times with those that are past, would enable our young people, emigrating from their luxurious homes at "the East," to bear, in a spirit of patience and contentment, the slight privations and hardships they are at this day called to meet with. If, in one instance, this should be the case, the writer may well feel happy to have incurred even the charge of egotism, in giving thus much of her own history.

It may be objected that all that is strictly personal, might have been more modestly put forth under the name of a third person; or that the events themselves and the scenes might have been described, while those participating in them might have been kept more in the background. In the first case, the narrative would have lost its air of truth and reality--in the second, the experiment would merely have been tried of dressing up a theatre for representation, and omitting the actors.

Some who read the following sketches, may be inclined to believe that a residence among our native brethren and an attachment growing out of our peculiar relation to them, have exaggerated our sympathies, and our sense of the wrongs they have received at the hands of the whites. This is not the place to discuss that point. There is a tribunal at which man shall be judged, for that which he has meted out to his fellow-man.

May our countrymen take heed that their legislation shall never unfit them to appear "with joy, and not with grief" before that tribunal!

Chicago, July, 1855.

THE "EARLY DAY" OF THE NORTH-WEST