Battle of Fort Dearborn - Background

Background

Fort Dearborn was constructed by United States troops under the command of Captain John Whistler in 1803. It was located on the south bank of the Main Stem of the Chicago River in what is now the Loop community area of downtown Chicago. At the time, the area was seen as wilderness; in the view of later commander, Heald, "so remote from the civilized part of the world." The fort was named in honor of Henry Dearborn, then United States Secretary of War. It had been commissioned following the Northwest Indian War of 1785–1795, and the signing of the Treaty of Greenville at Fort Greenville (now Greenville, Ohio), on August 3, 1795. As part of the terms of this treaty, a coalition of Native Americans and Frontiers men, known as the Western Confederacy, turned over to the United States large parts of modern-day Ohio, and various other parcels of land including 6 square miles (16 km2) centered at the mouth of the Chicago River.

The British Empire had ceded the Northwest Territory—comprising the modern states of Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Michigan, and Wisconsin—to the United States in the Treaty of Paris in 1783. However the area had been the subject of dispute between the Indian Nations and the United States since the passage of the Northwest Ordinance in 1787. The Indian Nations followed Tenskwatawa, the Shawnee Prophet and the brother of Tecumseh. Tenskwatawa had a vision of purifying his society by expelling the "children of the Evil Spirit", the American settlers. Tenskwatawa and Tecumseh formed a confederation of numerous tribes to block American expansion. The British saw the Indian nations as valuable allies and a buffer to its Canadian colonies and provided arms. Attacks on American settlers in the Northwest further aggravated tensions between Britain and the United States. The Confederation's raids hindered American expansion into potentially valuable farmlands in the Northwest Territory.

In 1810, as a result of a long running feud, Captain Whistler and other senior officers at Fort Dearborn were removed. Whistler was replaced by Captain Nathan Heald, who had been stationed at Fort Wayne, Indiana. Heald was dissatisfied with his new posting and immediately applied for leave of absence to spend the winter in Massachusetts. On his return journey to Chicago he visited Kentucky where he married Rebekah Wells, the daughter of Samuel Wells, and they traveled together to Chicago in June 1811.

As the United States and Britain moved towards war, antipathy between the settlers and Indians in the Chicago area increased. In the summer of 1811 British emissaries tried to enlist the support of Indians in the region, telling them that the British would help them to resist the encroaching American settlement. On April 6, 1812 a band of Winnebago Indians murdered Liberty White, an American, and John B. Cardin, a French Canadian, at a farm called Hardscrabble that was located on the South Branch of the Chicago River in the area now called Bridgeport. News of the murder was carried to Fort Dearborn by a soldier of the garrison named John Kelso and a small boy who had managed to escape from the farm. Following the murder some residents of Chicago moved into the fort while the rest fortified themselves in a house that had belonged to Charles Jouett, an Indian Agent. Fifteen men from the civilian population were organized into a militia by Captain Heald, and armed with guns and ammunition from the fort.