Fortunately in both these instances a remnant of the original has been preserved to us through the very fact of its retention in private hands. Swearingen retained part of his private papers, and some of these, including the original journal of the march of the troops from Detroit to Chicago in 1803 to establish the first Fort Dearborn, are still in the possession of his descendants.[931] Of Kinzie's account books a transcript of the names together with some additional data is all that remains.[932] Its preservation is due to the fortunate circumstance that ten years before the Chicago Fire the list was copied for the use of a historical worker, who carried it with him when he left Chicago to enter the Union army. More than forty years later, on the occasion of the centennial of the founding of Fort Dearborn, the original books having been destroyed, it was returned to the Historical Society.
[931] For the Journal see supra, Appendix I.
[932] The allusion is to the Barry Transcript, which has been cited in various footnotes.
A source of equal regret to the investigator is the fact that many of the documents pertaining to the massacre which actually remain to us are a disappointment in one respect or another. Captain Heald, who of all men was best qualified to speak with authority, left a report of only a page to cover the entire period from the preliminary massacre at Chicago in April until his arrival in Pittsburgh late in October. Lieutenant Helm, who should have been the best qualified witness after Heald, labored long and arduously upon a narrative which goes into minute detail with respect to the massacre itself; on examination, however, it becomes evident that much of the author's labor was directed to the end of misstating rather than revealing the facts. McAfee, one of the best historians of the War of 1812, deriving his information from Sergeant Griffith, a participant in the massacre, saw fit to devote but three pages to his account of the fall of Fort Dearborn. Finally, in Mrs. Kinzie, the author of Wau Bun, the youthful Chicago gained a writer of more than usual charm, who from her position in the Kinzie family and her proximity to the massacre in point of time enjoyed an opportunity now gone forever to gain from eye-witnesses of the events attending the massacre information for an authoritative narrative; yet her account is perhaps the most disappointing, from the historical point of view, of any with which we have to deal.
It is our immediate task, however, to estimate the sources of information that remain to us for what they are worth. First in order must be placed the report of Captain Heald to the government. His official rank, the concise yet inclusive manner of expression, the early date, October 23, 1812, all unite to give it priority of consideration. Hull's terse compliment, "Captain Heald is a judicious officer, and I shall confide much to his discretion," Heald's record in the service, the peculiar circumstances under which he took command at Fort Dearborn, and the few papers of his in existence, show him to have been an officer of merit and of judgment. In striking contrast with the narratives of some of his detractors, Heald's report is marked by an air of candor and plain common sense. He gives not the slightest intimation of any feeling of prejudice or hostility toward anyone in the garrison or settlement. Kinzie, the trader, who looms so large in the Wau Bun narrative, is not even mentioned. No statements calculated to challenge the reader's credulity are made. From any point of view the report must be ranked as historical material of a high order of excellence, our only ground for disappointment proceeding from its brevity.
Heald's official report is supplemented to some extent by his journal, which sketches the main events of his life until after his retirement from the army, and by a number of letters and papers in the Draper Collection and in the possession of his descendants. The second important source is the narrative of Lieutenant Helm, written in the summer of 1814. It is approximately three times as long as Heald's report, and describes the actual battle with much detail. Written by the officer second in command of the troops, it would be of inestimable value to the student in supplementing Heald's report, were it not for the fact that in this instance the author's candor is as conspicuous by its absence as it is by its presence in the former one.
Further consideration of Helm's narrative is reserved for the present. After these accounts of the two ranking officers, who were also the only ones to survive the battle, must be placed the narratives of their wives as recorded by their descendants. These are the relation of Rebekah Heald as told to her son, Darius Heald, and his family, and the Helm-Kinzie account embodied in Mrs. Juliette Kinzie's Wau Bun.
Rebekah Heald was the only one, apparently, of those concerned in the massacre who took the trouble to write a comprehensive account of her life in Chicago. Before her death in 1856 she dictated to a niece a large number of facts connected with her early life. The manuscript was foolscap and contained, according to her son's recollection of it, several hundred pages.[933] During the Civil War the Heald residence in St. Charles County, Missouri, was ransacked from cellar to garret by a band of Union soldiers. Among other things which were taken by the marauders was Captain Heald's sword, and Mrs. Heald's manuscript. The sword was recovered by a negro boy, but the manuscript has never since been seen, and was probably destroyed at the time.[934]
[933] For the history of this manuscript, together with Darius Heald's recital to Kirkland of his mother's story of the massacre, see Magazine of American History, XXVIII, 111-22.
[934] Curiously enough, if Darius Heald's impression is correct, it was a Chicago regiment which perpetrated the act of destruction (ibid., 122).