With one foot firmly planted on the prairie frontier and the other in the drawing rooms of her mind, Juliette Magill Kinzie wrote the first known account of life in early Chicago. Published in 1856, Wau-Bun: The ‘Early Day’ in the North-West is a hodgepodge of autobiography, social history, and travelogue chronicling the years between the Fort Dearborn massacre of 1812 and the Sauk war of 1832.
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By the time she arrived in 1831, Chicago looked little like what she’d imagined as a girl. White settlers had been developing the area around the second Fort Dearborn, rebuilt in 1816, though there remained plenty of Winnebago. Wau-Bun enumerates the pioneer town’s inhabitants, describes its topography, and details the role of the Kinzie family in the area’s early history. John H. Kinzie’s father, John Sr., was a fur trader who had grown up in the area and was on good terms with most of the Indian tribes.
Wau-Bun ends with an account of the Sauk war and its tragic repercussions for the Winnebago living near Chicago. The conflict began when Sauk warriors crossed the Mississippi River, attacking U.S. forts as they traveled east to reclaim land in Illinois. Kinzie describes the constant terror she lived with during that war. After seeing what she thought was a Sauk Indian doing a war dance in front of her home, she thought death “by the hands of savages is the most difficult to face.” But the Indian turned out to be a Winnebago dressed as a Sauk in order to frighten the white women. That “trick,” Kinzie realized, “would not be unnatural in a white youth, and perhaps since human nature is everywhere the same, it might not be out of the way in an Indian.” No longer regarding the Indians as savages, Kinzie would become sympathetic to their plight. During the war the Winnebago had allied themselves with the Americans, but afterward they were unjustly punished. The Treaty of Rock Island, which ended the war, forced them to give up their land in Illinois and Wisconsin and move across the Mississippi into eastern Iowa, pushing the Sauk even farther west.
Art accompanying story in printed newspaper (not available in this archive): photos/courtesy Chicago Public Library, Special Collections & Presentation Division.
