In 1800, John Kinzie married Eleanor (Lytle) McKillip, the widow of a British officer, who had had by him a daughter named Margaret. The Kinzies, with their infant son, John Harris (born at Sandwich, Ontario, July 7, 1803), apparently settled at Chicago in the spring of 1804, John Kinzie being the trader at Fort Dearborn, then just constructed. Kinzie was also appointed sub-Indian agent, and later was a government interpreter. His connection with the massacre at Fort Dearborn, in 1812, is best related in Wau-Bun itself. In 1823, he was appointed a justice of the peace; in 1825, agent at Chicago for the American Fur Company; he died at Chicago in 1828, aged sixty-five. His four children by Eleanor were: Jolm Harris (1803), Ellen Marion (1805), Maria Indiana (1807), and Robert Allen (1810). His two children by Margaret McKenzie were tenderly reared by Mrs. Kinzie, who, before her marriage, had been fully informed of the circumstance of the earlier union under the forest code of the day.
JOHN HARRIS KINZIE.
From copy of oil portrait by G. P. A. Healy, painted by Daisy Gordon, in possession of Chicago Historical Society.
It is with John Harris Kinzie that our immediate interest lies. His early youth was spent in Chicago; he was nine years of age at the time of the massacre in 1812; during the next four years the family remained in Detroit, only returning to Chicago when (1816) the former town was captured by General Harrison; in 1818, he was sent to Mackinac to be apprenticed to the American Fur Company. Carefully trained to the conduct of the fur trade, then the principal commercial interest in the Northwest, young Kinzie was sent, in 1824, to Prairie du Chien, where he learned the Winnebago language and thereof partly constructed a grammar. Two years later, we find him installed as private secretary to Governor Lewis Cass, in whose company he assisted in making numerous treaties with the aborigines. It was while in this service that he went to Ohio to study the language and habits of the Wyandots, of whose tongue he also compiled a grammar. His remarkable proficiency in Indian languages led to his appointment, in 1829, as Indian agent to the Winnebagoes, at Fort Winnebago (Portage, Wisconsin). Upon the death of his father, he fell heir to the Winnebago name, “Shawneeaukee,” which appears so frequently in the text of Wau-Bun.
August 9, 1830, Kinzie—now styled “Colonel” by courtesy, because of his office as Indian agent—was married at Middletown, Connecticut, to Juliette A. Magill, the authoress of the book of which this is a new edition. Very little has been garnered concerning the early life of Miss Magill. She was born in Middletown, September 11, 1806, but appears to have lived much in the national metropolis, and to have enjoyed a wide and intimate acquaintance with the “best families” of the city; her education was certainly not neglected.
The honeymoon of the young pair was in part spent in New York City. They were at Detroit a few weeks after the wedding, however, and thence took the steamer “Henry Clay” for Green Bay. The text of Wau-Bun commences with the departure from Detroit, and carries us forward to their arrival at Green Bay, and later at Fort Winnebago; their horseback trip to Chicago, the following March, is also interestingly described. They appear to have permanently made their home in Chicago in 1834.
In 1841, Colonel Kinzie was appointed registrar of public lands; seven years later, he was canal collector at Chicago, occupying the position until President Lincoln commissioned him as a paymaster in the Union army, with the rank of major. He was still holding this office when, in the early summer of 1865, being in failing health, he went to Pennsylvania in company with his wife and son, but died in a railway carriage near Pittsburg, upon the 21st of June. His widow, two sons, and a daughter survived him; together with the reputation among his contemporaries of possessing a lovable, sympathetic soul, broad enough to appreciate the many good traits of the commonly despised savage, concerning whom he knew more than most men.
Mrs. Kinzie’s death came upon September 15, 1870, while spending the season at Amagansett, on Long Island, New York. She had sent to a druggist for some quinine, but through inadvertence he instead sent morphine, in the taking of which she lost her life. The heroine of Wau-Bun, besides wielding a graceful pen and a facile pencil, was a woman with marked domestic virtues, and in every walk of life a charming character.