She knows the fact that Col. Proctor, the British commander at Maiden, bought the scalps of our murdered garrison of Chicauga, and thanks to her noble spirit, she boldly charged him with his infamy in his own house.
She knows further, from the tribe with whom she was a prisoner, and who were the perpetrators of those murders, that they intended to remain true, but that they received orders from the British to cut off our garrison, whom they were to escort.
Oh, spirits of the murdered Americans! can ye not rouse your countrymen, your friends, your relations, to take ample vengeance on those worse than savage bloodhounds?
An Officer.
March 18th, 1813.
This is manifestly written to "fire the patriotic heart" of the country to rally to the defence of "Buffaloe," a frontier town in deadly fear of its Canadian neighbors, in sight beyond the Niagara River. Mrs. Helm herself must have learned with surprise that while she, with the rest of the Kinzie family, was hospitably entertained at "Parc-aux-vaches," on the St. Joseph, she was suffering "three months' slavery among the Indians;" and later, while living in Detroit, she was enduring "three months' imprisonment among their allies," the English. Also that during the five days after the massacre, when she tells us she was, with much discomfort and more alarm, living in the Kinzie mansion with her relatives, she was really dragging a canoe, barefooted, wading along the stream, deprived of all sustenance except the flesh of her murdered countrymen, especially poor Wells's carved-up and bleeding heart—which, by the way, she had only heard of; never seen! Such things serve very well to prove to us that, as creators of imaginative fiction, newspaper correspondents of those days were equal even to those of our own.
More absurd, if possible, is a letter printed in Niles' Register of May 8, 1813, purporting to have been written by one Walter Jordan, a non-commissioned officer of regulars, stationed at Fort Wayne, to his wife, in Alleghany County, dated Fort Wayne, October 19, 1812. In the first place, it is most unlikely that any such white man should have been in Captain Wells's company and remained unmentioned. We hear of nobody as arriving but Captain Wells and his thirty Miami Indians. In our day, it is true, a captain would be likely to be accompanied by an orderly; but Wells had been brought up in too stern a school to be provided with such an attendant. Then, too, the narrative bristles with absurdities. The story is as follows:
I take my pen to inform you that I am well, after a long and perilous journey through the Indian country. Capt. Wells, myself, and an hundred friendly Indians, left Fort Wayne on the 1st of August to escort Captain Heald from Fort Chicauga, as he was in danger of being captured by the British. Orders had been given to abandon the fort and retreat to Fort Wayne, a distance of 150 miles. We reached Chicauga on the 10th of August, and on the 15th prepared for an immediate march, burning all that we could not fetch with us. On the 15th at 8 o'clock we commenced our march with our small force, which consisted of Captain Wells, myself, one hundred Confute Indians, Captain Heald's one hundred men, ten women, twenty children—in all 232. We had marched half a mile when we were attacked by 600 Kickapoo and Wynbago Indians. In the moment of trial our Confute savages joined the savage enemy. Our contest lasted fifteen minutes, when every man, woman and child was killed except fifteen. Thanks be to God, I was one of those who escaped. First they shot the feather off my cap, next the epaulet off my shoulder, and then the handle from the sword; I then surrendered to four savage rascals. The Confute chief, taking me by the hand and speaking English, said: "Jordan, I know you. You gave me tobacco at Fort Wayne. We won't kill you, but come and see what we will do to your captain." So, leading me to where Wells lay, they cut off his head and put it on a long pole, while another took out his heart and divided it up among the chiefs and ate it up raw. Then they scalped the slain and stripped the prisoners, and gathered in a ring with us fifteen poor wretches in the middle. They had nearly fallen out about the divide, but my old chief, the White Racoon, holding me fast, they made the divide and departed to their towns. They tied me hard and fast that night, and placed a guard over me. I lay down and slept soundly until morning, for I was tired. In the morning they untied me and set me parching corn, at which I worked attentively until night. They said that if I would stay, and not run away they would make a chief of me; but if I would attempt to run away they would catch me and burn me alive. I answered them with a fine story in order to gain their confidence, and finally made my escape from them on the 19th of August, and took one of the best horses to carry me, being seven days in the wilderness. I was joyfully received at Wayne on the 26th. On the 28th day they attacked the fort and blockaded us until the 16th of September, when we were relieved by General Harrison.
One is uncertain whether to rate this as a yarn made by some penny-a-liner out of such scraps as might be picked up from common rumor and the tales of returned stragglers of the thirty Indians who ran away when the attack began, or the lying story of a fellow who was really of the party, and one of the leaders, not in the fight, but in the flight. His enumeration of "one hundred Confute Indians," (no tribe of that name being known to history) in place of the band of thirty Miamis, his estimate of Captain Heald's "one hundred men, ten women and twenty children," his march of "half a mile," his statement that all were killed except fifteen, which would make the loss of life over two hundred, in place of Captain Heald's estimate of fifty-two, all tend to force the conclusion that there was no Walter Jordan in the matter. The latter part of the story, representing himself as heroically losing feather, epaulet and sword-hilt to the rascally savages, who still refrained from inflicting bodily injury on him, his then being kindly but firmly led to the place where poor Wells, in the presence of his niece, was waiting to have his head cut off and set up on a pole, and his heart cut out and divided among the chiefs, etc., tends to the belief that Walter Jordan was present, ran away, saved himself, reached Fort Wayne and devised this cock-and-bull story to explain his long absence, his personal safety and his possession of a horse which did not belong to him. Another hypothesis is that he started from Fort Wayne with Wells, deserted on the road, hung around until he got the story as told by the Indian fugitives, and (finding that his captain was dead) put a bold face on the matter and came in, bringing a horse he had been lucky enough to "capture" when its owner was not looking.
The next item is dated more than a year later; a year during which the wretched captives seem to have suffered miseries indescribable. The story bears the stamp of truth so far as the escaped fugitives knew it: