At St. Joseph the Kinzie family remained under the protection of Chief Topenebe and his band until the following November. They were then conducted to Detroit under the escort of trusty Indian friends, and delivered up as prisoners of war to the British. Soon after John Kinzie was paroled, though afterwards again taken into custody. At the end of the war he was finally released, and in 1816 he again became a resident of Chicago, when the second Fort Dearborn was built and occupied by a garrison of United States troops.
After the destruction of Fort Dearborn, Chicago ceased for a time to be a fit dwelling-place for white men and their families. It continued in this condition with but little change for the following four years, and then the troops came back. Meanwhile peace had been concluded between the two warring nations, treaties of peace and friendship had been made with various tribes of Indians, and a new era began.
During the winter succeeding the battle and massacre the only two residents of Chicago who were householders were Ouilmette and Du Pin. A pretty fair estimate may be made of the total population of the place, including the half-breed children of Ouilmette and the engagés and helpers in the employ of Du Pin. It is safe to say that the total number was not more than ten or twelve persons.
Bloody retribution overtook at least one of those among the savages who on the day of the massacre showed no mercy to his victims. This was a chief known as a deadly enemy of the whites and who bore the expressive name of Shavehead, because of his peculiar manner of tying up his scanty hair. Years afterwards Chief Shavehead was in company with a band of hunters in the Michigan woods; in the party was a white man who had formerly been a soldier at Fort Dearborn, and was one of the survivors of the battle on the lake shore. At one of the campfires the chief, being of a boastful disposition related, while under the influence of liquor to those sitting about the camp-fire, the frightful tale concerning the events of that day, dwelling upon its horrors and boasting of his own deeds. He was not aware that one of the whites whom he had so fiercely assailed was at that moment listening to his braggart utterances. The old soldier, as he heard the tale, was maddened by the recall of the well-remembered scenes.
Toward nightfall the old savage departed alone in the direction of the forest. Silently the soldier with loaded rifle followed upon his steps. Others observed them as they passed out of sight into the shades of the forest. The soldier returned after a time to his companions, but Shavehead was never again seen. "He had paid the penalty of the crime," says Mason, "to one who could with some fitness exact it."
The War of 1812, between the United States and Great Britain, was actually begun some time before the date of the declaration of war issued by the United States, on June 12, 1812; and it was continued some time after the treaty of peace had been signed, December 24, 1814. Of this war, the Fort Dearborn massacre on August 15, 1812, was one of the disastrous events.
"The lives of thirty thousand Americans," says Larned, "were sacrificed during this war of two and a half years, and the national debt was increased one hundred millions of dollars."
Nine years cover the period of existence of Old Fort Dearborn. In that nine years of history it witnessed the efforts of three nations to subdue a continent, and played its part in the struggles between those nations. Established as a frontier post, it became an important link in the chain of western defenses, and one of those schools of military instruction in which lessons were learned by those who had the task of preserving by force of arms a young republic in the midst of powerful and unscrupulous foes. A rallying point for traders and settlers in the virgin fields of the west, it was representative of a phase of development of the great Northwest Territory, and indeed of the development of the United States. Its culminating disaster, which left it a heap of ruins, was one of those temporary setbacks which do not for long hold back the progress of such a growing nation. Within four years after the accident of war had made the fort and those in and about it the victims of a lingering barbarism, the foothold of the nation was secure in the west, the beginnings of its agricultural and commercial prosperity were laid, and upon the ruins of the old fort rose the walls of a new Fort Dearborn.
THE END.