Fort Dearborn—Conflict, Commemoration, Reconciliation
Fort Dearborn—Conict, Commemoration, Reconciliation, and the Struggle over “Battle” vs. “Massacre” JOHN N. LOW Ohio State University, Newark The 200th anniversary of the Battle of Fort Dearborn in the city of Chicago was celebrated in August, 2012. There have, in fact, been four “battles” over the razing of the fort. The rst was the actual battle itself; the second was over how the settlers of Chicago collectively memorialized the event; and more recently there were struggles in 2009 and 2012 over how the encounter should be commemorated. The resulting conict over how the battle would be remembered reects the powerful and often contentious nature of memorialization. The details surrounding the circumstances and nature of the so-called “Fort Dearborn Massacre,” as it came to be known, appear to have been sub- stantially supported by the literature and histories being written in the late nineteenth century, including Mrs. John Kinzie’s Narrative of the Massacre at Chicago, August 15, 1812 and of preceding Events (1844), Wau-Bun, the Early Days in the Northwest (1873), Joseph Kirkland’s The Chicago Massacre of 1812 (1893), and Heroes and Heroines of the Fort Dearborn Massacre, A romantic and tragic history of Corporal John Simmons and his heroic wife, by N. Simmons (1896). The idea that the battle was a “mas- sacre” was effectively written in stone (okay, bronze) with a monument commissioned in 1893 by industrialist George Pullman. The (in)famous statue of Black Partridge saving a settler, which originally sat across from Pullman’s home, eventually ended up in a Chicago Park District warehouse.
[Show full text]