An account of the garrison life at Fort Dearborn in this period would be incomplete without some reference to a drearier subject than any yet mentioned. The personnel of the army at this time was far from high. A considerable proportion of the men were foreigners,[404] and a far larger number were illiterate.[405] The life at the frontier posts was monotonous, drinking and desertions were common, and the punishment for infractions of discipline was atrocious. We have no record of the court martial proceedings at Fort Dearborn, but the records for some of the other northwestern posts are painfully abundant, and a sketch of their contents will answer as well for Fort Dearborn. The orderly book of Anthony Wayne, who has been well described as a "furious disciplinarian,"[406]id="Page_-7">- -7 presents a picture of corporal punishments meted out to the soldiers at Detroit in 1797, worthy of the palmiest days of the army of Frederick the Great.[407]
[404] Of the fifty-nine men in Captain Whistler's company at Fort Detroit in 1812 eighteen were foreigners. Of the fifty men in Captain Rhea's company at Fort Wayne in 1810 fourteen were foreigners (Kingsbury Papers, quarterly returns of the companies in question).
[405] Approximately 60 per cent of the members of Captain Heald's company at Fort Dearborn at the close of the year 1811 were unable to sign their names to the payroll receipts (payroll receipt of Fort Dearborn garrison for last quarter of the year 1811, in Heald Papers, Draper Collection, U, VIII, 92).
[406] Detroit Tribune, April 5, 1896.
[407] The orderly book is printed in Michigan Pioneer Collections, XXXIV, 341-734. It covers the five-year period from 1792 to 1797. The cases which I have chosen for illustration all occurred at Detroit in the last-mentioned year.
The commonest offense charged was drunkenness, the usual penalty for which was the public infliction of from twenty-five to one hundred lashes, and in the case of petty officers reduction to the ranks. Occasionally resort was had to other methods to punish and humiliate the guilty one. One culprit, a corporal, charged with desertion, was sentenced to walk the gauntlet six times between double ranks of soldiery, both ranks striking at the same time.[408] Two camp followers, a man and a woman, charged with selling liquor to a soldier were sentenced to be drummed out of camp to the tune of the Rogues' March, with a bottle suspended around the neck of each and the man's left hand tied to the woman's right. In this plight they were to be paraded past the citadel and through the barracks of the soldiery and the principal streets of the town.[409] The man's sentence was remitted, but that against the woman was carried into execution the same afternoon. Still another culprit, guilty of enticing a soldier to desert, was ordered to be given fifty lashes with "wired Catts," to have the left side of his head and his right eyebrow close shaved, and to be drummed with a rope around his neck through the citadel and fort and the principal streets of the town.[410]
[408] Ibid., 704.
[409] Ibid., 701-9.
[410] Ibid., 715.
It may be supposed that the punishments inflicted under Wayne's command were severer than those meted out at Fort Dearborn a few years later. Yet they show what might be done by an army officer at that time in the maintenance of discipline. The records of courts martial at Fort Detroit under Kingsbury's régime, after Whistler's removal thither from Fort Dearborn in 1810, probably reflect fairly the state of affairs at Fort Dearborn.[411] In general the punishments are milder than those formerly meted out under Wayne. The common crimes were still drunkenness and desertion. For the former sentences of from twenty-five to fifty lashes on the "bear back" were commonly decreed. It should be noted that Whistler and Helm, both of whom served at Fort Dearborn, were often members of the court by which these sentences were imposed.