Lalime was, I understand, an educated man, and quite a favorite with the officers, who were greatly excited. They decided he should be buried near Kinzie's house, in plain view from his front door and piazza. The grave was enclosed in a picket fence, which Mr. Kinzie, in his lifetime, kept in perfect order. My impression has ever been that Mr. Kinzie acted, as he told his wife, in self-defence. This is borne out by the fact that, after a full investigation by the officers, whose friend the deceased was, they acquitted Mr. Kinzie, who then returned to his family.
In some of these details I may be in error, but the fact has always been firm in my mind that Lalime made the attack, provoking the killing, in self-defence. Mr. Kinzie deeply regretted the result, and avoided any reference to it.
Yours,
G. S. Hubbard.
Mr. Hubbard does not say he remembers having seen the grave. He did not come to Chicago to live until 1836. Judge Blodgett, as we shall see hereafter, describes its position as not on the river bank, but back in the timber.
A somewhat different account of the affair was given by Mrs. Porthier (Victoire Mirandeau,) and printed in Captain Andreas' History of Chicago, Vol. II, page 105.
My sister Madeline and I saw the fight between John Kinzie and Lalime, when Lalime was killed. It was sunset, when they used to shut the gates of the fort. Kinzie and Lalime came out together, and soon we heard Lieutenant Helm call out for Mr. Kinzie to look out for Lalime, as he had a pistol. Quick we saw the men come together. We heard the pistol go off and saw the smoke. Then they fell down together. I don't know as Lalime got up at all, but Kinzie got home pretty quick. Blood was running from his shoulder, where Lalime had shot him. In the night he packed up some things and my father took him to Milwaukee, where he stayed until his shoulder got well and he found he would not be troubled if he came back. You see, Kinzie wasn't to blame at all. He didn't have any pistol nor knife—nothing. After Lalime shot him and Kinzie got his arms around him, he (Lalime) pulled out his dirk, and as they fell he was stabbed with his own knife. That is what they all said. I didn't see the knife at all. I don't remember where Lalime was buried. I don't think his grave was very near Kinzie's house. I don't remember that Mr. Kinzie ever took care of the grave. That is all I know about it. I don't know what the quarrel was about. It was an old one—business, I guess.
This bears all the thumb-marks of truth. It comes at first hand from a disinterested eye-witness. Even if we suppose Mrs. Kinzie to have seen the affray, which she does not say, it was doubtless from the opposite side of the river, while Victoire and her sister were in the fort itself. No other account, direct from an eye-witness, has ever been published.
Now, without pretending to certainty, it strikes me as probable that up to this time Kinzie stood on the Indian side of the irrepressible conflict between white men and red men, while the army and Lalime took the other. Mrs. Helm's narrative in Wau-Bun is decidedly hostile to the good sense of the commandant of the fort, and even to the courage of some of his faithful subordinates, while obviously friendly to the mutinous element in his command. Therefore it seems to me quite likely that Lalime's crazy attack on Kinzie was not entirely disconnected with that irrepressible conflict, that this long-standing quarrel had more than appears on the surface to do with the admitted success of Kinzie's trade and the well-known unprofitableness of the business carried on by the government agency.
On April 29th, 1891, there was unearthed at the southwest corner of Cass and Illinois streets, a skeleton. Workmen were digging a cellar there for a large new building, and were startled by having the shovel stopped by a skull, wherein its edge made a slight abrasion. Further examination brought to light some spinal vertebrae, some fragments of ribs, some remains of shoulder-blades and pelvis-bones, some bones of the upper and lower arms and the hip-bones, besides two bones of the lower part of one leg; also fragments, nearly crumbled away, of a rude pine coffin. The rumor of the discovery spread through the neighborhood, and luckily reached the ears of Mr. Scott Fergus, son of the veteran printer, Robert Fergus, whose establishment stands within ten feet of the place where these relics of mortality had so long lain unnoticed.