And with what feelings did they now re-enter the fort, and what an
aspect did it present! Half-drunken Indians were yet engaged in
the work of plunder and destruction, insomuch so that it scarcely
appeared to them the same place from which they had sallied out in
the morning; and there were moments when the stoutest-hearted wished
that they had never returned to it, but perished on the field where
their comrades lay, unconscious of the past, regardless of the
future of desolation, of which all they saw seemed to give promise.
The officers' quarters, and the blockhouses, which had afforded
them protection and shelter during many a long year, were now burst
open, and every article of heavy bedding and furniture hurled into
the square--the latter ripped open, and broken, and the feathers
and fragments strewn around as if in mockery of the neatness that
had ever been a distinctive characteristic of the well--swept parade
ground, where heretofore a pin might have been picked up without
a finger being soiled in the act. These were, seemingly, too minute
considerations to have weighed at such a moment when higher and
more important interests were at stake; but, to the well-regulated
eye of the soldier, accustomed to order and decorum, they were now
mountains of inequality and discomfort, which contributed as much
to the annoyance and mortification of his position as the very fact
of captivity itself; and if this was the feeling generally of the
men, how deep must have been its effect on the officers, and
particularly on Capt. Headley, who had ever been punctilious to a
nicety in all that regarded the internal arrangements of Fort
Dearborn. But, offensive as this was, how much more so was it to
behold many of the band fantastically arrayed, not only in their
own clothing, but in that of their wives, desecrating, as it were,
the terrible solemnity of the day, and mocking at the severity of
suffering to which the latter had been subjected.
Of the Indians who had formed their escort, some stopped outside
the gate, others mixed with the spectators, and only about a dozen
followed them to the mess room, which Winnebeg said he had selected
for their temporary quarters, as being the least liable to
interruption or molestation. He promised to send them food, and
later in the evening, when all was quiet, to conduct the two officers
to their wives, who, for greater quiet and security, were still
lying concealed in the canoe where he had first placed them.
"Winnebeg, Winnebeg," said Capt. Headley, solemnly, "how can we
ever sufficiently repay you for your noble conduct to-day? Depend
upon it, I shall not fail to make known to our Great Father that
you have saved the lives of one third of the detachment; but let
me remind you of the first part of our contract--the burial of the
dead. There is plenty of daylight, and I wish to send out a dozen
men for the purpose of digging one common grave for them all. Mr.
Ronayne must, if not dead, be brought in on a litter; if, however,
he is no more, no grave can be more honorable to him than that
shared with his followers. You know, Corporal Collins, where the
spades and picks are kept."
"Yes, sir, I know where they are usually kept, and where it is not
likely they have been disturbed. What men, sir, am I to take?"
Almost every man in the detachment expressed his anxiety to be of
the party; but the remainder of those who had been with the Virginian
when he fell, and a few others, all unmarried men, were selected.
"Do you not think, sir," said Lieutenant Elmsley, "that I should
command this party and superintend the arrangements? Poor Ronayne
must be delicately handled."
"If you will do so, Mr. Elmsley, I shall be most glad; but not
deeming it absolutely necessary, I did not propose it as a point
of duty. But there is another thing to be considered: Winnebeg,
what escort will you give to my people? You know your young men
are excited, and many may not know of the conditions of our
surrender."
During this conversation, almost the whole of the Indians, to the
number of eighteen or twenty, who have been alluded to as having
plundered and offensively arrayed themselves in the dresses of the
officers' wives, and who were evidently the most turbulent of the
band, had been drawing gradually closer around the little party of
prisoners. All were more or less ludicrously painted, and exhibited
the most grotesque appearance.
When the remnant of the detachment first entered the fort, it was
remarked that one of them--a mere youth--had closely, almost
impertinently, examined the features of the officers, and had
followed, with most of his companions. When Captain Headley made
his request for an escort, this individual suddenly went up to
Winnebeg, tapped him on the shoulder, and said something, not in
Pottowatomie but in Shawnee, accompanied by much gesticulation,
which seemed to have great weight with the chief.
"Give him escort, dis," said the latter in reply, as he glanced
his eye quickly upon the group, and with seeming intelligence.
"What! those men!" returned Captain Headley, with a shadow of
remonstrance in his tone.
"Yes, all good Pottowatomie--all brave warrior--no give him dis,"
and he pointed to those who had accompanied them from the field,
"all too much tired with fight already--dis men stay here all day.
No fight."
Although by no means persuaded by the reasoning of Winnebeg, that
men who had been plundering and drinking what they could find,
during the whole of the morning, were the most proper persons to
guard prisoners from the violence of excited enemies, Capt. Headley
felt that it would be imprudent to urge any further opposition.
For a single moment, it occurred to him that the chief had offered
this escort with a hostile motive, but it was a thought which,
involuntarily forced upon his mind, was as instantly discarded as
unworthy of the chief, and, whatever might have been his latent
misgivings, he no longer opposed an objection.
The preparations were soon made; the litter, and materials for
digging found, and the little party, who had taken off their uniforms
to avoid particular remark, and to be more free in their movements,
sallied forth. On passing near the gate, and in a direction opposite
to that by which they had just entered, they beheld the body of
Doctor Von Voltenberg, within a few paces of the pathway by which
they now advanced, which was the route taken by the Indians with
the three-pounder. He was stripped to the skin, scalped, and with
a profusion of large green flies and ants of the prairie settled
on and seemingly disputing possession of the dark and coagulated
blood that was already incrusted on the festering wound. The body
was fast becoming bloated and discolored under the rays of an August
sun, but no one could mistake the black and the peculiarly cut
whisker, and the good natured and smiling expression of face which
even in death had not wholly deserted him.
They had now reached the point where the Indians stood when the
first grenades were thrown in among them by the followers of Ronayne.
From this could be commanded a full view of the theatre of contest
as far as the crest of the sandhill, being a full musket-shot from
the spot where he had last fallen. The intermediate space, as has
already been remarked, was thickly strewn with dead bodies amounting
in all to upwards of a hundred, and the place chosen for interment
by Lieutenant Elmsley was the small copse of underwood, from which
the flank movement had been made upon Ronayne by the fresh band of
Indians upon whom he had directed the fire of the three-pounder.
While occupied in digging a grave of about twenty feet square,
their strangely attired looking escort amused themselves with
examining the dead uniformed bodies that lay strewed thickly around,
and it was remarked that they showed no such curiosity in regard
to their own people who were indiscriminately mixed up with them.
Gradually they approached the crest of the hill, and Lieutenant
Elmsley, who was distrustful of their intentions, and kept a close
eye upon their movements, saw the youth, already noticed, suddenly
bound with uplifted tomahawk towards the spot where poor Ronayne
was known to lie, and, after addressing a few words to his companions,
stoop over his body, with what intention he could not make out,
but he presumed to dispatch and to scalp him, for the cry uttered
by the Virginian and heard even at that distance, was piteous to
hear. Desiring the men to go on with their work, and collect
the bodies as soon as it was completed, he hurried rapidly to the
scene of this new action, and as he advanced saw another and a much
stronger party of Indians approaching the same spot. Rapidly their
escort closed in upon the officer over whom the young warrior was
kneeling, and stooping down, drew from their victim another moan
of inexpressible anguish. All then rose, and, grouped together,
moved away parallel with the said ridge until they were finally
lost behind a sudden elevation that continued the hill in an obtuse
angle towards the forest.
Startled by the appearance of these fresh comers, Lieut. Elmsley
paused for a moment in his advance, but feeling that any appearance
of mistrust might act unfavorably upon the band, he renewed his
course, expecting at every moment to reach the mangled body of his
friend. The Indians approached the same point at the same time,
and he saw at once that the majority were composed of those who
had accompanied Winnebeg when he came to offer terms to Captain
Headley. Trusting, therefore, that there was no violence to be
apprehended from those who were aware of the fact of the surrender,
towards himself or party, he proceeded to search for his friend;
but, to his surprise, his body was not to be seen. He could not be
mistaken as to the spot where it had lain, close to Sergeant Nixon;
but, though the latter was nearly in the same position in which he
had fallen, the knife which he had used upon the throat of the
Chippewa, and the imprint of his body upon the sand, deeply moistened
with the blood of both, was the only indication of Ronayne's having
been there. It was evident that he had been carried off by the
strange party who had formed their escort, and that the cries of
agony uttered by him had been produced by the torture of moving
his broken limb. What the motive for this new outrage could have
been, it was difficult to conjecture, unless it was to secure at
their leisure, and before the other party of Indians came up to
dispute possession of the spoils with them--not only his scalp,
but the blood-stained colors which he bore--perhaps to sell the
latter as a trophy to the British.
Without condescending to bestow the slightest notice upon the
officer, the Indians approached the bodies, and leisurely proceeded
to strip them of their clothing. Their leader, uttering a yell of
delight and surprise as he came near it, sprang upon the sergeant
and secured the scalp, which Pee-to-tum had failed to take. This
piece of good fortune led the others to hope for something similar,
and they accordingly dispersed themselves rapidly over the scene
of combat, examining every head and stripping everybody. All this
was done without Lieut. Elmsley having the slightest power to
interfere, for he knew that any attempt at remonstrance would only
be to provoke a similar fate, and thus the party passed on, stripping
every soldier to the skin.
While he lingered hesitatingly near the spot whence his friend had
been so singularly removed, waiting for the plunderers of the dead
to depart before he should rejoin his men, his ears were suddenly
assailed by a piercing shriek from the further extremity of the
underwood in which the latter were digging, and which extended
about two hundred yards on the left of the plain below. At once he
knew the cry, and comprehended its cause; and rushing down the
sandhill without thought of the new danger to which he might be
exposed, turned the corner of the small wood, and stopping abruptly
at a point where he could see without being noticed himself, beheld
A sight as distressing as, a few moments before, it had been
unexpected.
With his uncovered head slightly raised, and reposing upon the
projecting root of a tall tree that rose capriciously, yet
majestically, amid the stunted growth around, lay the enfeebled
and dying Ronayne extended upon a pile of clothing formed of the
very dresses that had now been doffed for the purpose by his escort.
By his side knelt his wife, disguised in the neat dress of one of
Wau-nan-gee's sisters, and gazing into his pale face with a silent
expression of agony which no language could render. But though his
face was wan, and his eye gradually losing its lustre, the arm of
the officer closely clasped around the waist of his wife, ever and
anon strained her so passionately, so convulsively to his heart
that a new fire seemed at these moments to be enkindled in both--and
to prove all the intensity of the undiminished love he bore her.
Neither spoke. Speech could not so well convey what was passing in
their sad souls as could their looks, while the exhausted state of
the wounded officer rendered exertion of any kind not merely painful
but impossible. On the other side of the Virginian, who held his
hand affectionately in his feeble grasp, stooped the young Indian
already noticed, and standing grouped round, and gazing with evident
sorrow on the scene, were his companions. The youth was Wau-nan-gee.
His companions were his immediate and devoted friends--those who
had sought to make the young officer a prisoner on a former occasion,
when, had they succeeded, all this trial of the wife's agony might
have been spared. On the first exit of the troops they had rushed
into the fort on the pretence of plunder and excess, in the hope
that their example would be imitated by many, and that thus the
detachment might be left to pursue its route comparatively unharmed.
And to a certain extent they succeeded, for many did follow them,
and Pee-to-tum among the rest, whose absence in the first onset of
the battle had dispirited the Indians, whom he had first excited,
and given the Americans an advantage of which they never lost sight
until the close. To have taken an active part in the defence, would
have been not only impossible but impolitic, but in the course they
had pursued they had no doubt saved such of the detachment as
remained, for had all been engaged--had all borne a prominent share
in the attack, the event, from the great disparity of numbers,
could not have long been doubtful. When Wau-nan-gee, whose anxiety
to know his fate had been great, first heard from his father of
the wounded condition of Ronayne, he had proffered himself and
friends as the escort of the detachment, intending to bear off the
body, without being seen by the other Indians, to his mother's
tent, where his wounds might be dressed and his life saved by the
care and attention of his own wife.
All these particulars Lieut. Elmsley subsequently ascertained from
Winnebeg, for anxious as he was to take a last leave of his dying
friend, and to express his joy at once again beholding, even under
these disheartening circumstances, her for whom both himself and
his wife had ever entertained the strongest friendship, the officer
was afraid to move from the spot where, unseen himself, he had
witnessed all, lest by suddenly exciting and agitating, he should
abruptly destroy the life which was evidently fast drawing to a
close. To have broken that solemn and silent communion of spirits,
would, he felt, have been sacrilege, and he abstained; and yet, as
if fascinated by the sight, he could not leave the spot--he could
not abandon his dearest and best friends without lingering
to know how far his services might yet be available to both or one.
Apparently, Mrs. Ronayne had not uttered a sound since that piercing
cry had escaped her which attested her first knowledge of the
hopeless condition of her wounded husband. The attempt to carry
him off the field, with the view not only of preventing him from
being scalped, as he certainly would have been by the party then
advancing, but of conveying him to the Indian camp of the women,
had been productive of the greatest suffering; so much so that when
he had gained the point where he now lay, and where his wife had
first met him, he declared to Wau-nan-gee his utter inability to
proceed further, and prevailed on him to place him on the ground
that he might die in quiet.
It was now near sunset, and the condition of the Virginian was
momentarily becoming weaker. He suddenly made an attempt to rally,
and for a moment or two raised himself upon the elbow of the hand
that still encircled the waist of his wife.
"Maria, my soul's adored!" he murmured, "I feel that I have not
many moments left, and I should die in despair did I not know that
there is one who will protect you while he has life. God knows what
has been the fate of our poor companions, but even if living, they
cannot shield you from danger. Wau-nan-gee," he said, turning
faintly to the youth, "two things I am sure you will promise your
friend--first, to conduct yourself in all things as my wife--your
sister--desires; secondly, to conceal and guard these colors until
you can deliver them up to the nearest American fort." Then, when
the youth had solemnly promised, with tears filling his dark eyes,
that he would faithfully execute the trust, he turned again to his
wife, and said in a tone that marked increased exhaustion at the
effort he had made, "Maria, sweet, it is hard to die thus--to leave
you thus; but yet you will not be alone--Wau-nan-gee will love and
protect you, obey your will: yet you need not now fear, I have
avenged your wrong--that wrong of which the ruffian boasted when
I slew him--tortured him--the monster. How different the gentle
love of this affectionate boy! But I have not strength--oh, what
sickly faintness comes over me! surely this must be ----."
"Death!" he would have added, but silence had for ever sealed the
lips that never more would speak his undying affection for his
noble, graceful, and accomplished wife.
For some moments the unhappy woman continued to gaze upon the still
features of her husband as though unconscious of the extent of her
great misery, and when the reaction came, it was not expressed in
shrieks or lamentations, or strong outward manifestations of emotion,
but in the calm, serene, condensed silence of the sorrow that
stultifies and annihilates. Her cheek was pale as marble, and there
was a fixedness of the eye almost alarming to behold, as she rose
erect from her bending position, and said, with severity, "This
and more have your cursed people done, Wau-nan-gee! I shall ever
hate to look upon an Indian face again! Yet that body must be buried
deep in the ground, and in a spot known only to us both, where none
may violate the dead. You have promised to obey me in all things.
This is the first charge upon you. Let us go--the night is fast
approaching, and the place remains to be reached, and the grave is
to be dug. By to-morrow's dawn we travel together and alone
through the wilderness, in execution of the will of your friend
and my husband. Mark that, Wau-nan-gee! It is his will that we
travel together--that you shall be my guide and protector. See
this dress, how well it disguises me. I shall be taken, as we
journey, for your squaw. Ha! ha! That will be excellent, will it
not? Maria Heywood--Ronayne's wife--the mistress of a fiend--then
Wau-nan-gee's squaw--and not yet six weeks married to the first!"
She suddenly paused, put her hand to her brow--seemed to reflect,
and then turning to Wau-nan-gee, inquired why he lingered so long
and wherefore he did not replace the body in the litter and depart.
With a pensive and serious mien the youth, who had been still
kneeling, absorbed in sorrow at the strange coldness of Mrs.
Ronayne's manner, and afraid to disturb her in a distraction which
he comprehended more from her looks and actions than her language,
now rose, and saying something in a low tone to his companions,
who had also regarded her throughout with silent surprise, the
covering on which the body of the unfortunate officer reposed, was
placed upon the blanket, which four of the party held extended,
and at the direction of Wau-nan-gee the whole proceeded towards
the forest.
When this strange and dispiriting scene had terminated, Lieut.
Elmsley, who felt at each moment in a greater degree the uselessness
of any interference in his powerless position, was rejoiced that
at least the last moments of his friend had been consoled by the
presence of his wife; he was led to hope that it had been the result
of a momentarily-disordered brain, on which despair had now wreaked
its worst, and which, therefore, might be expected to regain a
stronger if not its wonted tone when the bitterness of grief should
have somewhat subsided.
Proposing to prevail on Winnebeg to obtain for him a meeting with
her on the morrow, when the remains of her husband should have been
consigned to their rude resting-place, he returned towards his
party, whom he found in the act of covering up the bodies which
they had, unmolested by the Indians, brought in from the different
points where they had fallen. The grave was soon filled up--a
short and mournful prayer read by the officer from memory, and the
party returned full of gloom, and with hearts bowed down by sorrow,
to the dismantled and desolate-looking fort.