This extended Indian trade made the employment of a large number of men at headquarters a necessity, and the Canadian voyageurs in the service of Mr. Kinzie were about the only white men who had occasion to visit Chicago during those early years. He was sutler for the garrison at the fort in addition to his Indian trade, and also kept up his manufacture of the ornaments in which the Indians delighted. During the first residence of Mr. and Mrs. John Kinzie in Chicago, three children were born to them—Ellen Marion in December, 1805; Maria Indiana in 1807, and Robert Allen, February 8, 1810. Margaret McKillip, Mr. Kinzie's step-daughter, who married Lieutenant Linai T. Helm of Fort Dearborn, and also Robert Forsyth, nephew of Mr. Kinzie, were at times members of his family, the latter being the first teacher of John H. Kinzie.
Henry H. Hurlbut in his delightful "Chicago Antiquities,"[AR] says:
By what we learn from a search in the county records at Detroit, John Kinzie seems to have been doing business there in the years 1795-97 and '98. In May, 1795, some portion of the Ottawa tribe of Indians conveyed lands on the Maumee to John Kinzie, silver-smith, of Detroit; also in the same year to John Kinzie, merchant, of Detroit. It appears, also, from the same records, that in September, 1810, John Kinzie and John Whistler Jr. were lately copartners in trade at Fort Dearborn, and in the same year John Kinzie and Thomas Forsyth were merchants in Chicago. We are told by Robert A. Kinzie that his father was sutler at Fort Dearborn when he came to Chicago in 1804; possibly Mr. Whistler Jr. was his partner in that enterprise. In October, 1815, John Kinzie and Thomas Forsyth were copartners in trade in the District of Detroit, Territory of Michigan. In March, 1816, appear on the records the names of John Kinzie, silver-smith, and Elenor, his wife, of Detroit. By these items it seems that though Mr. Kinzie took up his residence in Chicago in 1804 [the first entry here upon his books bore date May 12, 1804] and that he left here after the battle of August, 1812, returning in 1816, yet he was still identified with Detroit, certainly until the summer of 1816. We notice that he was a witness at the treaty of Spring Wells, near Detroit, in September, 1815. He was one of the interpreters.
[AR] A book full of bits of old-time gossip, traditions and skeptical notes on other traditions, controversial criticism on Wau-Bun and other books, and good-humored raillery, aimed at persons and things of the early day. Only five hundred copies were printed, and the book is becoming scarce, but some copies remain for sale in the family of its author, 27 Winthrop Place, Chicago.
Wau-Bun gives a long and romantic biography of John Kinzie and his progenitors; such a sketch as would naturally (and properly) be made by a daughter-in-law, writing during the lifetime of many of the persons directly interested in the facts related, but omitting things which would shock the sensibilities of those persons, and mar the literary symmetry of the picture set forth in her pages. She does not allude to the Margaret McKenzie episode, never mentions James Kinzie, well-known Chicagoan as he was, and also ignores another matter which the integrity of history requires to be stated, and which the lapse of almost three generations should disarm of the sting which might attach to it at the time of Wau-Bun. This matter is the killing, in self-defense, of John Lalime, by John Kinzie. (See [Appendix F].)
MRS. JULIETTE KINZIE (1856).
Author of "Wau-Bun."
After the massacre and the subsequent events so romantically described in Wau-Bun, Mr. Kinzie returned, probably in the autumn of 1816, to Chicago, where he reoccupied the historic house. To sit on his front porch and watch the building of a new fort in the old spot must have been a mingling of pleasure and pain. All that had passed since the original incoming of twelve years before must have seemed like a dream. The lake to the eastward, the river in front, the prairie beyond and the oak woods behind him were all as of old; but here around him were the children born and reared in the intervening years; here were new soldiers to take the place of the little band sacrificed four years ago. There, scattered over the sand-hills, were the bleaching bones of the martyred dead, and within dwelt an enduring memory of the horrors of their killing.
