[Y] See Mrs. Kinzie's narrative and Captain Heald's letter, hereinafter quoted.
The Kinzies did not return to their North Side house. Mr. Kinzie had succeeded Lalime as government interpreter, and doubtless the garrison needed his services almost continually. There were several slight alarms and disturbances. A night patrol fired at a prowling red-man, and a hatchet hurled in return missed its mark and struck a wagon-wheel. A horse-stealing raid upon the garrison stables, failing to find the horses, was turned into an attack on the sheep, which were all stabbed and set loose. These alarms and other things combined to show that the quiet of the preceding days had come to an end. The unspeakable Indian had been bribed, tempted and misled by the miserable Englishman to take up again his cruelties; his burning, scalping, tomahawking, knifing and mutilation of combatants and non-combatants alike, men, women and children.
War was declared by the United States against England on June 12, 1812. Mackinaw was taken by the British on July 16. Having Detroit to protect and a force of British and Indians to oppose, General Hull naturally aimed to mass his forces and abandon all indefensible outlying posts, such as Fort Dearborn evidently was. Therefore, about August 1st, he sent by Winnemeg, a friendly Indian, a dispatch to Captain Heald, ordering him to evacuate the fort and to proceed to Detroit by land with his command, leaving it to his discretion to dispose of the public property as he might think proper.[Z] Mrs. Kinzie, in Wau-Bun, says that the messenger arrived on August 7th, instead of the 9th which Captain Heald names as the date of his receipt of the order, and adds that the same letter brought news of the declaration of war (which had taken place about two months earlier) and of the loss of the post at Mackinaw. She also gives us a new reading of the dispatch, quite different from that given by Captain Heald. She says the orders to Captain Heald were "to vacate the fort if practicable, and in that event to distribute all the United States property contained in the fort and in the United States factory, or agency, among the Indians in the neighborhood." This discrepancy between our two sources of information becomes important in judging of the blame, if any, attributable to Captain Heald for the disaster toward which all were hastening. Guided by the ordinary rules of evidence, we must take Captain Heald's version as the true one, and believe that the order was peremptory, only to be disobeyed if the subordinate officer felt sure that it would not have been given if his superior had been on the spot; and also that the distribution of goods was, on Captain Heald's part, a voluntary concession intended to win the favor of the Indian—the incurable savage.
[Z] See [Appendix E].
It should here be stated that there is a broad divergence—one might say a contradiction—between the Kinzie account and the Heald account of the occurrences of that troubled, appalling, disastrous time. Mrs. Kinzie says that Winnemeg privately told Mr. Kinzie that the fort ought not to be evacuated, seeing that it was well supplied with provisions and ammunition, and advised waiting for reinforcements. Also that if Captain Heald was to go at all, he should start at once, to get out of the way of the hostiles by a forced march while the Indians were dividing the spoil. (How many "forced marches" would it have taken to make that lumbering caravan safe from pursuit by the red runners of the wilds?) She says:
The order for evacuating the post was read next morning upon parade. It is difficult to understand why Captain Heald, in such an emergency, omitted the usual form of calling a council of war with his officers. It can only be accounted for by the fact of a want of harmonious feeling between himself and one of his junior officers—Ensign Ronan, a high-spirited and somewhat overbearing, but brave and generous young man.
A "council of war" between the captain and his two lieutenants and (perhaps) the surgeon, to debate an unconditional order received from the general commanding the division, does not strike the average reader as an "usual form," nor does any disaffection on the part of the junior among the officers seem likely to enter into the question, one way or the other. But the suggestion throws a side-light on the unhappy state of things at Fort Dearborn. It seems unquestionable that this young ensign was not in accord with his captain, and that the Kinzies, especially the young story-teller, Mrs. Helm (who was Mrs. Kinzie's authority), sided with the junior—as was perhaps natural. To quote from Munsell:
It becomes necessary here to call to mind the possible bias which may have existed in the hearts of the narrators in handing down the story to Mrs. Kinzie, the writer of Wau-Bun, who probably never saw the principal actor in it, John Kinzie, behaving died two years before her marriage with his son, John H. Kinzie. The latter was only nine years old at the time of the massacre. His mother, however, Mrs. Kinzie, she did know well, also his aunt, Mrs. Helm [John's step-daughter], from whose lips the Wau-Bun account of the massacre was taken down by her. It is quite certain that departure meant ruin to John Kinzie; for of all the property he had accumulated in his long, able, arduous and profitable business life, not a handful could be carried away by land. And the event showed that he, personally, had nothing to fear from the Indians.
Here is what Mrs. Heald says about these matters:
It is all false about any quarrel between Ronan and Captain Heald. The ensign thought the world of the captain, and gave him a big book with their two names written it. Among the property recovered after the massacre was this book, which the Indians thought was the Bible. They would pass their hands across the pages and point significantly heavenward; but in fact the book was a dictionary and is still in possession of the family, having been bound in buckskin to preserve such part as has not already succumbed to the many vicissitudes. Occasionally Indians would come and steal horses when the men were some distance away cutting hay for the winter's supplies, and they were apt to try to get the scalp of any white person against whom they had any hard feeling.