Chapter XIX: Appendix: F

THE BONES OF JOHN LALIME.--SUBSTANCE OF A PAPER READ BY JOSEPH KIRKLAND BEFORE THE CHICAGO HISTORICAL SOCIETY, ON THE OCCASION OF THE PRESENTATION TO THE SOCIETY OF CERTAIN HUMAN RELICS, JULY 21, 1891.

SOME ominous threatenings were heard at old Ft. Dearborn before the bursting of the storm of August 15, 1812. Among them was the killing of the interpreter for the government, John Lalime.

John Kinzie arrived at Fort Dearborn in 1804, and with his family occupied a house built of squared logs, which, up to about 1840, stood where the corner of Cass and Kinzie streets now is. He was an Indian-trader, furnishing what the savages desired and taking furs in exchange. The government also had an Indian agent, or trader, there.

Various circumstances tend to show that before 1812 considerable rivalry existed between the government fur-trading agency and the civilian dealers. The former had certain advantages in the cheapness of purchase and transportation, but were restricted as to selling liquor. The latter were nominally under the same restriction, but practically free, and the Indians, like other dipsomaniacs, hated every man who tried to restrain their drinking. The short-sighted savages mistook their friends for their enemies, their enemies for their friends. They loved the poison and the poisoner.

Mrs. Kinzie, in Wau-Bun, says that there were two factions in the garrison, the Kinzies sympathizing with the opposition. Also that, though the garrison was massacred, no Kinzie was injured, the immunity extending even to Lieutenant Linai T. Helm, who had married Mr. Kinzie's step-daughter. Also that while the fort was burned, the Kinzie mansion was left untouched, and remained standing up to within the memory of living men.

For several years before 1812, John Lalime, a Frenchman, had been the government's salaried interpreter at Fort Dearborn. The earliest mention of the name occurs in a letter written from St. Joseph by William Burnett to his Detroit correspondent, which begins with the words: "When Mr. Lalime was in Detroit last you was pleased to tell him that if I should want anything at your house, it should be at my service." The next intelligence about him is in two letters he wrote concerning Indian matters. The first was to Wm. Clark, Governor of Missouri, and reads as follows:

Chicago, 26th May, 1811.

Sir--An Indian from the Peorias passed here yesterday and has given
me information that the Indians about that place have been about
the settlements of Kaskasia and Vincennes and have stolen from
fifteen to twenty horses. It appears by the information given me
that the principal actors are two brothers of the wife of Main Foe.
He is residing on the Peoria, or a little above it, at a place they
call "Prairie du Corbeau." By the express going to Fort Wayne I
will communicate this to the agent. I presume, sir, that you will
communicate this to the Governor of Kaskasia and General Harrison. I
am sir, with respect,

Y'r h'ble serv't,
J. Lalime.

The second letter is the one mentioned in the first. It is written to John Johnson, United States factor at Fort Wayne, dated July 7th, 1811, and reads as follows:

Since my last to you we have news of other depredations and murders
committed about the settlement of Cahokia. The first news we received
was that the brother-in-law of Main Poc went down and stole a number
of horses. Second, another party went down, stole some horses, killed
a man and took off a young woman, but they being pursued were obliged
to leave her to save themselves. Third, they have been there and
killed and destroyed a whole family. The cause of it in part is from
the Little Chief that came last fall to see Governor Harrison under
the feigned name of Wapepa. He told the Indians that he had told the
governor that the Americans were settling on their lands, and asked
him what should be done with them. He told the Indians that the
Governor had told him they were bad people.

We observe that the Peoria chief, Main Poc, is mentioned as blameworthy for these wrongs. It may be interesting to know Main Poc's side of the question. Said he:

You astonish me with your talk! Whenever you do wrong there is
nothing said or done; but when we do anything you immediately take
us and tie us by the neck with a rope. You say, what will become of
our women and children if there is war? On the other hand, what will
become of your women and children? It is best to avoid war.

Lalime's letters show that he was a man of ability and education. We also guess, from a clause in Article III of the treaty of 1821, that Lalime lived after the manner of those days, and left at least one half-breed child. The clause reserves a half-section of land for "John B. Lalime, son of Noke-no-qua."

Miss Noke-no-qua is not otherwise known to history.

The next knowledge we have of Lalime relates to his violent death in the spring of 1812, about five months before the massacre, at a point on the south bank of the river within a stone's throw of where is now the south end of Rush Street bridge.

In a letter written by the lamented Gurdon Hubbard to John Wentworth, June 25th, 1881, we read:

As regards the unfortunate killing of Mr. Lalime by Mr. John Kinzie,
I have heard the account of it related by Mrs. Kinzie and her
daughter, Mrs. Helm. Mr. Kinzie never, in my hearing, alluded to or
spoke of it. He deeply regretted the act. Knowing his aversion to
conversing on the subject, I never spoke to him about it.

Mrs. Kinzie said that her husband and Lalime had for several years
been on unfriendly terms, and had had frequent altercations; that at
the time of the encounter Mr. Kinzie had crossed the river alone,
in a canoe, going to the fort, and that Lalime met him outside the
garrison and shot him, the ball cutting the side of his neck. She
supposed that Lalime saw her husband crossing, and taking his pistol
went through the gate purposely to meet him. Mr. Kinzie, closing with
Lalime, stabbed him and returned to the house covered with blood. He
told his wife what he had done, that he feared he had killed Lalime,
and probably a squad would be sent for him and that he must hide.
She, in haste, took bandages and with him retreated to the woods,
where as soon as possible she dressed his wounds, returning just
in time to meet an officer with a squad with orders to seize her
husband. He could not be found. For several days he was hid in the
bush and cared for by his wife.

Lalime was, I understand, an educated man, and quite a favorite with
the officers, who were greatly excited. They decided he should be
buried near Kinzie's house, in plain view from his front door and
piazza. The grave was enclosed in a picket fence, which Mr. Kinzie,
in his lifetime, kept in perfect order. My impression has ever been
that Mr. Kinzie acted, as he told his wife, in self-defence. This
is borne out by the fact that, after a full investigation by the
officers, whose friend the deceased was, they acquitted Mr. Kinzie,
who then returned to his family.

In some of these details I may be in error, but the fact has always
been firm in my mind that Lalime made the attack, provoking the
killing, in self-defence. Mr. Kinzie deeply regretted the result, and
avoided any reference to it.

Yours,
G. S. Hubbard.

Mr. Hubbard does not say he remembers having seen the grave. He did not come to Chicago to live until 1836. Judge Blodgett, as we shall see hereafter, describes its position as not on the river bank, but back in the timber.

A somewhat different account of the affair was given by Mrs. Porthier (Victoire Mirandeau,) and printed in Captain Andreas' History of Chicago, Vol. II, page 105.

My sister Madeline and I saw the fight between John Kinzie and
Lalime, when Lalime was killed. It was sunset, when they used to
shut the gates of the fort. Kinzie and Lalime came out together,
and soon we heard Lieutenant Helm call out for Mr. Kinzie to look
out for Lalime, as he had a pistol. Quick we saw the men come
together. We heard the pistol go off and saw the smoke. Then they
fell down together. I don't know as Lalime got up at all, but Kinzie
got home pretty quick. Blood was running from his shoulder, where
Lalime had shot him. In the night he packed up some things and my
father took him to Milwaukee, where he stayed until his shoulder
got well and he found he would not be troubled if he came back. You
see, Kinzie wasn't to blame at all. He didn't have any pistol nor
knife--nothing. After Lalime shot him and Kinzie got his arms around
him, he (Lalime) pulled out his dirk, and as they fell he was stabbed
with his own knife. That is what they all said. I didn't see the
knife at all. I don't remember where Lalime was buried. I don't think
his grave was very near Kinzie's house. I don't remember that Mr.
Kinzie ever took care of the grave. That is all I know about it. I
don't know what the quarrel was about. It was an old one--business, I
guess.

This bears all the thumb-marks of truth. It comes at first hand from a disinterested eye-witness. Even if we suppose Mrs. Kinzie to have seen the affray, which she does not say, it was doubtless from the opposite side of the river, while Victoire and her sister were in the fort itself. No other account, direct from an eye-witness, has ever been published.

Now, without pretending to certainty, it strikes me as probable that up to this time Kinzie stood on the Indian side of the irrepressible conflict between white men and red men, while the army and Lalime took the other. Mrs. Helm's narrative in Wau-Bun is decidedly hostile to the good sense of the commandant of the fort, and even to the courage of some of his faithful subordinates, while obviously friendly to the mutinous element in his command. Therefore it seems to me quite likely that Lalime's crazy attack on Kinzie was not entirely disconnected with that irrepressible conflict, that this long-standing quarrel had more than appears on the surface to do with the admitted success of Kinzie's trade and the well-known unprofitableness of the business carried on by the government agency.

On April 29th, 1891, there was unearthed at the southwest corner of Cass and Illinois streets, a skeleton. Workmen were digging a cellar there for a large new building, and were startled by having the shovel stopped by a skull, wherein its edge made a slight abrasion. Further examination brought to light some spinal vertebrae, some fragments of ribs, some remains of shoulder-blades and pelvis-bones, some bones of the upper and lower arms and the hip-bones, besides two bones of the lower part of one leg; also fragments, nearly crumbled away, of a rude pine coffin. The rumor of the discovery spread through the neighborhood, and luckily reached the ears of Mr. Scott Fergus, son of the veteran printer, Robert Fergus, whose establishment stands within ten feet of the place where these relics of mortality had so long lain unnoticed.

Mr. Fergus at once tried to save and collect the bones, and finding some disposition on the part of the laborers to disregard his requests, he rang for the police-patrol wagon, which bundled the little lot into a soap-box and carried them to the East Chicago Avenue station.

I was out of town at this time and did not hear of the interesting occurrence until Mr. Fergus told me of it upon my return, about a month later. I then went to the station, only to learn that the bones, being unclaimed, had been sent in the patrol-wagon to the morgue at the County Hospital, on the West Side. However, on looking up the officer who carried them over, he freely and kindly offered to try to reclaim them, and have them delivered to the Historical Society. The morgue officials, after a few days, at a merely nominal expense, complied with the request, and they are now here. Was this, _is_ this the skeleton of John Lalime?

The place where the bones were found is within a stone's throw of the exact spot indicated by Gurdon Hubbard as the place where the picket fence marked the grave, "two hundred yards west of the Kinzie house."

Dr. Arthur B. Hosmer, and Dr. Otto Freer, who have examined the relics independently of each other, and assisted me in arranging them in human semblance, consider them to be the skeleton of a slender white man, about five feet and four inches in height.

The color, consistency and general conditions indicate that they had lain in the ground (dry sand) for a very long time, reaching probably or possibly the seventy-nine years which have elapsed since Lalime's death.

Now, admitting their expert judgment to be correct, this man died not far from 1812. At that time there had not and never had been in all these parts more than some fifty to one hundred white men, nearly all of whom were soldiers, living in the fort and subject to burial in the fort burying-ground, adjoining the present site of Michigan Avenue and Randolph street. At a later date, say fifty years ago, isolated burials were not uncommon, but even then they could scarcely have occurred in so public a spot as the north bank cf the river, close to the docks and warehouses which had been by that time built there.

John C. Haines, Fernando Jones and others remember perfectly the existence of that lonely little fenced enclosure, and even that it was said to mark the resting-place of a man killed in a fight. They and all others agree that no other burials were made thereabouts, so far as known. Another point, favorable or otherwise to this identification, is the fact that the place where the skeleton was found is the lot whereon stood the first St. James Church, and that the attendants there, as I was informed by one of them, Mr. Ezra McCagg, never heard of any burial as having taken place in the church-yard.

On the other hand, Mr. Hubbard designates "the river bank" as the place of burial, and the memory of Mr. Fernando Jones is to the effect that the fenced enclosure was nearer to the place of Rush Street bridge than is the spot of finding.

But in contradiction to this view. Judge Blodgett tells me that he was here in 1831 and 1832, which was several years before either Mr. Jones or Mr. Haines, and before Mr. Hubbard came here to live, he being then trading at Danville. The Judge adds that with the Beaubien and Laframboise boys he paddled canoes on the creek, played in the old Kinzie log-house and wandered all about the numerous paths that ran along the river bank, and back into the thick, tangled underbrush which filled the woods, covering almost all the North Side west of the shore sand-hills. He says that one path over which they traveled back and forth ran from the old house west to the forks of the river, passing north of the old Agency house--"Cobweb Castle"--which stood near the northeast corner of Kinzie and State Streets. Also that from that path behind Cobweb Castle the boys pointed further north to where they said there was a grave where the man was buried whom John Kinzie had killed, but they never went out to that spot, and so far as he remembered he never saw the grave. A kind of awe kept him quite clear of that place. All he knows is that it was somewhere out in the brush behind the Agency house.

This seems to locate the grave as nearly as possible at the corner of Illinois and Cass streets, where these relics were found. Fernando Jones suggests that even if the grave was originally elsewhere, the remains might have got into the church lot in this way: In 1832 Robert Kinzie entered and subdivided Kinzie's Addition, bounded by Chicago Avenue on the north, the lake on the east, Kinzie Street on the south and State Street on the west, and gradually he and his brother John sold the lots. In 1835 they gave the St. James Society the two lots where the church was built and wherein this skeleton was found. What more likely than that on selling the lot whereon the original interment took place (supposing it to be other than where the bones were unearthed) the sellers were compelled, either by the buyer's stipulation or their own sense of duty to their father's manifest wishes, to find a new place for the coffin of poor Lalime, and thereupon selected the spare room in the new church-yard?

* * * * *

It is worthy of note, that as, with the skeleton, were found the remains of a coffin--a single bit of pine board, showing the well-known "shoulder angle," though decayed so that only a crumbling strip half an inch thick was left--this could not have been a secret interment, made to conceal the death of a man. It would seem utterly improbable that two men's bodies should have been coffined and buried within the little space of ground, in the few years of time pointed out by all these circumstances. We learn that Lalime was so buried; also that, so far as known, all other excavations thereabouts have failed to expose his remains; also that these relics have now come to light. Everyone must draw his own conclusion. I have drawn mine. If it be erroneous, this exploitation of the subject will be likely to bring out the truth.

* * * * *

LETTER FROM FERNANDO JONES.

Chicago, July 20th, 1891.

Joseph Kirkland, Esquire:

_Dear Sir_--In answer to your inquiry as to any incidents coming to
my knowledge as to the grave of John Lalime, who was buried near the
mouth of the Chicago River in the year 1812, I furnish the following
statement:

When I arrived in Chicago, on my sixteenth birthday, May 26th, 1835,
I landed on the north side of the present river, near its mouth, very
near to the old John Kinzie homestead. I was escorted to the historic
Cobweb Castle and the Dearborn Street bridge by the children of an
old friend of my father's, Samuel Jackson, who was employed upon the
north pier harbor work, and who had been an old neighbor in Buffalo,
New York, where he had also been employed upon the government harbor.
The little boy, Ezra, and the girl, Abigail, pointed out a grave
situated a little to the north of our path and several hundred feet
west of the Kinzie house. The grave was surrounded by a neat white
picket fence. I passed it many times afterward, during that and the
succeeding summer, and often visited it with children about my own
age. The history of this lonely grave, as detailed by them, gave it
a peculiar fascination to me, and to them, and to others who saw
it. I recall now, after an interval of mere than half a century, a
number of persons who visited this grave with me, among whom were
the Indian wife of Captain Jamison; the wife of Lieut. Thompson, a
half-breed woman; Virginia Baxley, daughter of Captain Baxley, of the
fort; Pierre Laframboise, son of a chief and interpreter; Alexander
Beaubien, son of a trader, and John C. Haines, who was also a clerk
near me on South Water Street.

The tradition in regard to this grave was that it was the last
resting-place of a Frenchman named Lalime, who was government
interpreter at the fort, and who was killed in an encounter with the
old Indian-trader, John Kinzie. It was said that the officers of
the garrison had the body buried in sight of Mr. Kinzie's house in
resentment for his murder. But it seems that old Mr. Kinzie took the
sting from this reproach by carefully tending the spot during his
lifetime, and his son, John H. Kinzie, continued the same care over
it.

Soon after the erection of St. James Episcopal Church, about the
year 1838, a grave was noticed on the north side of the lot and in
the rear of the church, which was situated on the southwest corner
of Cass and Illinois Streets, and opposite the new house of John H.
Kinzie. The lot upon which the Frenchman was buried had been sold
by Mr. John H. Kinzie, and was built upon, and Mr. Kinzie had given
the lot upon the corner for the church. Mr. Alonzo C. Wood, the
builder of the church, who still survives, informs me that the grave
appeared there mysteriously, and his remembrance is that the Rev.
Mr. Hallam, the priest in charge, informed him that the remains were
placed there by the direction of Mr. Kinzie, or Mrs. Kinzie, but he
has no further distinct recollection in regard to it. I, myself,
never mentioned the subject to Mr. John H. Kinzie, but remember a
conversation with his brother, Robert A. Kinzie, U. S. Paymaster, in
which he expressed satisfaction that his brother had taken care of
the bones of poor Lalime. It was understood by the few conversant
with the history of Lalime's death that both the elder Kinzie and
his son, John H., were averse to speaking of the matter, but "Bob"
was very like an Indian, and not at all reticent on the question,
and that the legend among those who took any interest in the matter
has always been that this solitary grave in the church-yard was the
grave of the "little Frenchman" who was first buried near the spot.
Under the circumstances, it is not strange that the removal should
have been quietly made, and I have little doubt in my own mind that
the tradition is correct.

Very sincerely yours,

Fernando Jones.

* * * * *

LETTER FROM THE HON. J. C. HAINES.

Chicago, 15 July, 1891.

Major J. Kirkland:
Without very definite recollection as to just where the grave of John
Lalime stood in 1835, when I came to Chicago, I can say that I knew
of its existence and have an impression it stood in St. James' Church
lot, corner of Cass and Michigan Streets.

John C. Haines.

* * * * *

DR. HOSMER'S LETTER.

108 Pine Street, Chicago, }
July 11, 1893. }

The bones shown me at this date at the Chicago Historical Society,
constitute the major portion of a human skeleton--that of an adult
white male of slender build and about five feet four to five inches
in height. There is evidence of a partial or complete fracture of the
left femur, at some time in his life, thoroughly repaired and with
some permanent thickening of the bone.

Judging by the color, weight and rotten condition of the bones, I
believe that they have been in the ground (supposing it to be sandy
and above water-level) at least sixty (60) but not to exceed one
hundred (100) years.

A. B. Hosmer, M. D.

* * * * *

DR. FREER'S LETTER.

The skeleton shown me by Mr. Joseph Kirkland is without doubt of
great age and resembles in appearance fragments of others that have
lain for many years in sandy soil. All animal matter has departed
from the bones, leaving them very light and consisting of the mineral
portions alone.

The type of skeleton is that of a man of moderate stature and light
build. The skull is that of a white man and of great symmetry. The
lower jaw is missing, but the upper perfect, barring loss of all
teeth but one. The presence of the third molar's sockets speaks
for the complete maturity of the man. It is impossible exactly to
estimate the exact time that the skeleton has been in the ground, but
its appearance would tally well with the eighty years it is supposed
to have lain there.

Dr. O. T. Freer.

July 20th, 1891.