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. That statue came to represent the dominant narrative of the battle as one of “red savages” attacking helpless settlers. In 2007, a local neighborhood association took possession of a small parcel of land near the site of the battle with the intent of creating a green space. Although intending to install the statue in the park and name the lot “Black Partridge Park,” the neighbor- hood association ultimately collaborated with local American Indian groups, 211 212 JOHN N. LOW historians, and others in using the park as an opportunity for reconciliation by leaving the park statue-less and naming it “The Battle of Fort Dearborn Park.” On the 200th anniversary of the Battle, numerous editorials and letters in the local press debated whether or not Chicagoans should let go of their massacre lore. Even politicians weighed in, with the Chicago City Council passing a resolution marking the 200th anniversary of the Battle of Fort Dearborn. The commemoration of the anniversary of the Battle of Fort Dearborn culminated an effort to reconsider and even reinscribe the history of “early Chicago.” ROUND ONE—THE 1812 BATTLE OF FORT DEARBORN The garrison of Fort Dearborn (built in 1803 at the mouth of the Chicago River) was evacuated on August 15, 1812. What or who provoked the hostilities of that day remains unclear, but just south of the fort, the eeing group of military personnel and non-combatants were attacked by Indians (primarily Potawatomi), and in the ensuing battle 28 regular soldiers and 14 civilians were killed. Thirty-eight soldiers and 13 civilians were cap- tured. Approximately 15 Indians are also believed to have died in the battle. Most of the captives were later delivered by the Indians to the British at Detroit. ROUND TWO—MEMORY, MEMORIAL, MONUMENT, AND COMMEMORATION Mikwéndek ‘What is remembered.’ (Potawatomi) Ni je ga je mikwéndek? ‘What was remembered?’ I yé i émikwéndek ‘That is what is remembered.’ Monuments are an opportunity to create a remembrance that is intended to inform the collective memory while marginalizing any counter-narrative (Halbwachs 1992:37). J. B. Jackson, a founder of critical landscape studies, wrote about monuments in his essay, “The Necessity for Ruins” (Jackson 1980:89–103). Monuments in the United States, according to Jackson, are often used as a teaching tool, civic in nature and purpose, which reminds us of some important event or individual that we are obliged to elevate and emulate. FORT DEARBORN 213 Memorials and monuments, as physical manifestations of public his- tory, appear often in the form of edices, obelisks, statues, and other objects of material culture and stand-in as a memory device recalling an entity, indi- vidual, or past event (Bederman 1995:19; Hass 1998:175; O’Brien 2010). The creator(s) of monuments hope to relieve the audience of the necessity of remembering or thinking for themselves. The makers hope the monument shapes “the History” as they wish it to be remembered. While monuments are most commonly thought of as structures, it is also possible to set aside PLACES to commemorate important peoples or events. For Pierre Nora, “sites of memory” are the xed, externalized locations of what was once an inter- nal socialized memory. According to Nora, History (with a capital H and as a national narrative) has the power not only to commemorate events and individuals but also to ossify remembrances (Nora 1989). Memory itself is a process by which some things are remembered, forgotten, imagined, and invented. The authority of memory is often insti- tutionalized in religious traditions, legends, songs, and literature; and our memories are stored in places of worship, museums, and archives, where they can then be reied, and reinterpreted for new purposes and a mul- titude of agendas. Rituals, myths, symbols, images, and practices are all a part of these ongoing engines of memory making and memorializing. Memory becomes “evidence” and we often compete for “who remembers best” (Schwartz 1982; Lipsitz 1990; Foucault 1991:59–60; Hall 1997; Stur- ken 1997; Crane 1997; Megill 1998; Stillman 2001). Collective memories are transferred from one person to another in order to make “remem- bering in common possible” (Connerton 2004). The power of remember- ing and forgetting is of particular importance since it is partly through the collective construction of the past that communal identities emerge ( Taborsky 1990). Collective memory is both metaphoric and legitimizing, and often enshrines a shared past and a national/group identity (Young 1993:7). Most of what we know about the Battle of Fort Dearborn is drawn upon the (often self-serving) accounts of white survivors and family histo- ries. The only written account of the battle from an Indian perspective comes from Simon Pokagon. A Potawatomi Indian, he recounted 60 years after the conict some of the stories his elders who had participated in the Battle had told him. His version of the events of the Battle emphasizes provocations by the United States as the cause of the confrontation (Pokagon 1899; Keating 214 JOHN N. LOW 2011). However, his memories of the accounts of his elders involved in the Battle were largely ignored as the collective memory of settler Chicago preferred to remember and commemorate the Battle of Fort Dearborn as a massacre of helpless white innocents by red savages. While later historians would attempt to complicate this simple storyline, the collective memory of “The Fort Dearborn Massacre” seemed secure (Kinzie 1844; Kinzie 1856; Andreas 1884; Kirkland 1892:111–112; Helm 1912; Quaife 1913; Quaife 1915; Quaife 1933; Barnhart 1945; Williams 1953). There are no shortages of monuments to Fort Dearborn.1 However, as noted above, the most famous memorial of the Fort Dearborn battle was created by Carl Rohl-Smith in 1893. His sculpture portrays the rescue of Margaret Helm from the tomahawk of an anonymous Indian by Potawatomi Chief Black Partridge (Gridley 1966:101). Commissioned by the famous “Captain of Industry” G. W. Pullman of Pullman Railway Car wealth, it was erected in front of his mansion at 18th St. and Prairie Avenue in Chi- cago near the site of the battle. Titled “The Fort Dearborn Massacre or the Pottawatomie Rescue,” the plaque at the front base of Rohl-Smith’s work describes the scene. Black Partridge, the Pottawattomie chief, saving Mrs. Helm from death by . tomahawk. At the back of the group Dr. Van Voorhees, the post surgeon (meets) his death . an Indian . thrusting a spear through his breast (Chicago Daily Tribune 1892). The design was inspired by Juliette Magill Kinzie’s problematic, but popu- lar, family history accounts of the attack of the Fort Dearborn evacuees (Kinzie 1856:16). It remains the most well-known “historical” representation of the events on August 15, 1812. 1. Originally located at the intersection of what is now Michigan Avenue and Wacker Drive, in Chicago, the fort’s outline is embedded in the sidewalk. The entrance to the London Guarantee Building at 360 North Michigan Avenue has a brass bas-relief of the fort above its doorway. The fort was reconstructed for Chicago’s 1933 Century of Progress Exposition. On the southeastern bridge keeper’s house of the Michigan Avenue Bridge, the battle is commemorated with another bas-relief by Henry Hering titled Defense. The location of the fort was designated a Chicago Landmark in 1971 and Chicago’s city ag contains four red stars on a eld of blue and white—the rst star is in remembrance of Fort Dearborn. Figure 1. “Black Partridge Saving Mrs. Helm,” a.k.a. “The Fort Dearborn Massacre Monument” (Postcard from the personal collection of the author) 216 JOHN N. LOW The statue, a grouping of six gures: two warriors attacking a white woman and man while a white infant reaches out helplessly, is typical of the “red savage” versus “good Indian” trope of the time and ignores the lack of American complicity in the Battle. As with most of the literature of this era, Indians are bifurcated into either noble or ignoble. Typical of the dominant narrative of the battle are the remarks of early twentieth-century historian Milo M.