TARDLY any one institution existing four score years ago, shows so wondrous a change as does the American newspaper. The steamboat, railroad, telegraph, telephone, power-press and other mechanical aids to the spreading of news have all been invented and perfected within that time, while gas and electric light have aided in the prompt reproduction of intelligence, and penny-postage in its dissemination. So that which was then an infant—say rather an embryo—is now a giant.
The very first published narrative of the massacre which is now at hand is the following account, very short and full of errors, taken from the Buffalo Gazette (date not given) and published in Niles' Weekly Register of October 3, 1812.[AG]
[AG] This paper, published in Baltimore, was the best general chronicle of events reported by correspondents or appearing in the few and meager outlying journals of the day.
Fall of Fort Dearborn, at Chicago.—Yesterday afternoon the Queen Charlotte arrived at Fort Erie, seven days from Detroit. A flag of truce soon landed, at Buffalo Creek, Major Atwater and Lieut. J. L. Eastman, who gave the following account of the fall of Fort Dearborn: On the first of September a Pottowatomie chief arrived at Detroit and stated that about the middle of August Captain Wells, from Fort Wayne [an interpreter], arrived at Fort Dearborn to advise the commandant of that fort to evacuate it and retreat. In the mean time a large body of Indians of different nations had collected and menaced the garrison. A council was held with the Indians, in which it was agreed that the party in the garrison should be spared on condition that all property in the fort should be given up. The Americans marched out but were fired upon and nearly all killed. There were about fifty men in the fort beside women and children, and probably not more than ten or twelve taken prisoners. Captain Wells and Heald [the commandant] were killed.
This brief report interests us in various ways. Detroit was in the British hands, and the Queen Charlotte a British ship, for Perry's victory had not yet been won. Major Atwater and Lieut. Eastman, here liberated by the British under flag of truce, were probably part of the army surrendered by General Hull on August 16, and paroled; these officers having remained in Detroit for some unexplained reason—perhaps because they were citizens of that city, as Atwater is an old Detroit name. (It has been given to a street there.) The Queen Charlotte was one of the ships captured by Perry on Sept. 10, 1813, and was sunk in Put-in-Bay, and twenty years later she was raised, repaired and put again in commission, this time as a trading-vessel, and it was on her that John Dean Caton, later Chief Justice of Illinois, and now (1893) an honored resident of Chicago, took passage at Buffalo with his bride, in 1834, and came to the land which was to be their home for sixty years.[AH]
[AH] Mrs. Caton died in 1892.
Regarding the rest of the fugitives we have very scanty reports. The next item we find is an utterly wild, false and fanciful statement of Mrs. Helm's vicissitudes, contradicting in every particular her own narrative, as given in Wau-Bun.
[From Niles' Weekly Register, Saturday, April 13, 1813.]
Savage Barbarity.—Mrs. Helm, the wife of Lieutenant Helm, who escaped from the butchery of Chicauga by the assistance of a humane Indian, has arrived at this place [Buffaloe]. The account of her sufferings during three months' slavery among the Indians and three months' imprisonment among their allies, would make a most interesting volume. One circumstance alone will I mention. During five days after she was taken prisoner she had not the least sustenance, and was compelled to drag a canoe (barefooted and wading along the stream) in which there were some squaws, and when she demanded food, some flesh of her murdered countrymen and a piece of Col. Wells' heart was offered her.