The first public appearance of Mrs. Kinzie as an author was in 1844, when there appeared from the press of Ellis & Fergus, Chicago, an octavo pamphlet of thirty-four pages, with a plate, entitled Narrative of the Massacre at Chicago, August 15, 1812, and of Some Preceding Events. This publication was anonymous; but as it bore the name of John H. Kinzie as the holder of the copyright, most readers assumed that he was the author. In time, it came to be known that his wife had written the work. The footnote to the opening page of chapter xviii of Wau-Bun (page 155 of our text) says that her story of the massacre was first published in 1836; but apparently no copies of this early publication are now extant. Mrs. Kinzie’s narrative was of course obtained from first hands, her husband and other members of her family having been witnesses of the tragedy; it has been accepted by the historians of Illinois as substantially accurate, and other existing accounts are generally based upon this. With slight variation, the contents of the pamphlet were transferred to the pages of Wau-Bun, of which they constitute chapters [xviii], [xix], and [xx].
Wau-Bun itself first appeared in 1856 (8vo, pp. 498), from the press of Derby & Jackson, New York. A second edition was published in 1857, by D. B. Cooke & Co., of Chicago, the same plates being used, with nothing changed but the title-page. Very likely it was printed by Derby & Jackson, in New York, for the Chicago booksellers named—a familiar device with the publishing trade. A third edition, an entire reset, in cheap duodecimo form, without illustrations, was published in 1873 by J. B. Lippincott & Co., Philadelphia (pp. 390). The Lippincotts had, in 1869, the year before her death, published a novel by Mrs. Kinzie, entitled Walter Ogilby, which apparently had a fair sale; and their reprint of Wau-Bun, which by this time had become scarce and out of copyright, was no doubt made to still further cultivate a market created by the novel. Even this reprint is now rare.
Wau-Bun gives us our first, and in some respects our best, insight into the “early day” of the old Northwest.[A] The graphic illustrations of early scenes which the author has drawn for us are excellent of their kind, indicating an artistic capacity certainly unusual upon the American frontier of seventy years ago. But better than these is the text itself. The action is sufficiently rapid, the description is direct, and that the style is unadorned but makes the story appear to us the more vivid. Upon her pages we seem to see and feel the life at the frontier military stockades, to understand intimately the social and economic relations between the savages and the government officials set over them, to get at the heart of things within the border country of her day. It is the relation of a cultivated eye-witness, a woman of the world, who appreciates that what she depicts is but a passing phase of history, and deserves preservation for the enlightenment of posterity. Many others have, with more or less success, written narratives within the same field; Mrs. Kinzie herself occasionally trips upon dates and facts, and sometimes she deliberately glosses where the antiquarian would demand recital of naked circumstance; but take Wau-Bun by large and small, and it may safely be said that to students of the history of the Middle West, particularly of Illinois and Wisconsin, Mrs. Kinzie has rendered a service of growing value, and of its kind practically unique.
[A] Similar reminiscences, almost as excellent in their way, but more limited in scope, are: Mrs. Charlotte Ouisconsin Van Cleve’s Three Score Years and Ten (Minneapolis, 1888), and Elizabeth Thérèse Baird’s articles in vols, xiv and xv, Wisconsin Historical Collections.
It is fitting that the Caxton Club should publish a new edition of this early Chicago classic, with the needed accessories of notes, index, and additional illustrations. The book deserves to be better known of the present generation, who will find in it a charming if not fascinating narrative, giving them an abiding sense of the wonderful transformation which seventy years have wrought in the development of the Old Northwest.
The present writer has selected the illustrations and furnished the Notes, Introduction, and Index to this edition, and exercised a general oversight of its make-up; to others, however, have been left, by the Caxton Club, the responsibility for the proof-reading of the text.
Mrs. Eleanor Kinzie Gordon, of Savannah, Ga., a daughter of Colonel and Mrs. John H. Kinzie, has kindly read the proof-sheets of Introduction and Notes, and offered several valuable suggestions, which have been gratefully incorporated in the text.
R. G. T.
Madison, Wis., October, 1901.