Mrs. Corbin, wife of Phelim Corbin, in an advanced stage of pregnancy, was tomahawked, scalped, cut open, and had the child taken out and its head cut off.
Turning to the latest muster-roll of the force, dated 1810, we identify among these survivors the names of Dyson Dyer, Nathan Edson, Paul Grummow, James Van Home, James Corbin and Phelim Corbin. Among the perished, August Mott, John Neads and Hugh Logan. To this sad list must be added four still more pitiable victims—the wife and unborn child of Phelim Corbin, and the unhappy Mrs. Neads, to whom death must have been welcome after seeing her little one "tied to a tree to keep it from following her and crying for victuals."
THE SECOND BLOCK-HOUSE IN ITS LAST DAYS.
Mrs. John Kinzie, in a sketch of the life of her husband (Chic. Hist. Society, July 11, 1877. Fergus' Hist. Series No. 10) says:
In 1816 the Kinzie family returned to their desolated home in Chicago. The bones of the murdered soldiers, who had fallen four years before, were still lying unburied where they had fallen. The troops who rebuilt the fort collected and interred these remains. The coffins which contained them were deposited near the bank of the river, which then had its outlet about at the foot of Madison Street. The cutting through the sand-bar for the harbor caused the lake to encroach and wash away the earth, exposing the long range of coffins and their contents, which were afterward cared for and reinterred by the civil authorities.
There is good reason to believe that Mrs. Kinzie was mistaken in thinking that the coffins exposed on the lake shore by the action of the waves, contained the bodies of those who perished in the massacre. The fort burying-ground certainly was at the place indicated, and the exposed coffins doubtless contained the bodies of those buried in that ground; but that does not include the massacre victims. Mr. Fernando Jones believes them to have been buried at where Seventeenth Street, extended, would cross Prairie Avenue.
A letter on the matter (kindly furnished me while these pages are in preparation) reads as follows:
Upon my arrival in Chicago, in the spring of 1835, being fifteen years of age, I became acquainted with a number of Indian and half-breed boys, as well as older persons, and visited many times the location of the Indian massacre of 1812. The spot was pointed out by some who were children at the time, and by others who had been informed by their parents. The burial-place where the victims were interred was quite distinct at that time. There was a mound in the prairie southwest of the massacre-ground, that was pointed out as the grave of the vidette, or soldier in advance of the retreating garrison.
The tradition was that the soldier ran west into the prairie, thinking to hide in the tall grass, but was pursued and killed and scalped and his body afterward buried by friendly half breeds.