WINNEMEG, OR THE CATFISH.
The battle having ended, and the prisoners being secured, the latter were conducted to the Pottawatomie camp near the fort. Here the wife of Wau-bee-nee-mah, an Illinois chief, perceiving the exhausted condition of Mrs. Helm, took a kettle, and dipping up some water from the stream which flowed sluggishly by them, threw into it some maple sugar, and, stirring it up with her hand, gave her to drink. “It was,” says Mrs. Helm, “the most delicious draught I had ever taken, and her kindness of manner, amid so much atrocity, touched my heart.” Her attention, however, was soon directed to other objects. The fort, after the troops had marched out, became a scene of plunder. The cattle were shot down as they ran at large, and lay dead, or were dying around her. It called up afresh a remark of Ensign Ronan’s, made before; “Such,” said he, “is to be our fate—to be shot down like brutes.”
The wounded prisoners, we have already remarked, were not included in the stipulation made on the battle-field, as the Indians understood it. On reaching, therefore, the Pottawatomie camp, a scene followed which beggars description. A wounded soldier, lying on the ground, was violently assaulted by an old squaw, infuriated by the loss of friends or excited by the murderous scenes around her—who, seizing a pitchfork, attacked the wretched victim, now helpless, and exposed to the burning rays of the sun, his wounds already aggravated by its heat, and he writhing in torture. During the succeeding night, five other wounded prisoners were tomahawked.
Those unwounded remained in the wigwams of their captors. The work of plunder being now completed, the fort next day was set on fire. A fair and equal distribution of all the finery belonging to the garrison had apparently been made, and shawls and ribands and feathers were scattered about the camp in great profusion.
After suffering many hardships, Mrs. Helm, Mrs. Heald, and the surviving male prisoners were ransomed and sent back to their friends. A few of them, however, were not set at liberty until after the battle of the Thames.
