[ILLUSTRATION:  IT SOON BECAME EVIDENT THAT HE DID NOT INTEND TO DROWN HER.]

One of the soldiers’ wives, having been told that prisoners taken by the Indians were put to terrible tortures, resolved from the first not to surrender.  When a party of savages approached her, she fought with desperation, although assured of kind treatment, and, exciting the anger of the Indians, was killed and left on the field.  After the surrender, twelve children in one of the baggage wagons were slain by a single savage.

Mrs. Rebecca Heald, the young captain’s wife, like Mrs. Helm was mounted on a horse.  She carried a rifle with which she shot a savage dead.  During the massacre, an Indian, with the fury of a demon in his countenance, advanced to her with his tomahawk raised.  She had been accustomed to danger and, knowing the temper of the Indians, with great presence of mind, looked him in the face and, smiling, said: 

“Truly, you will not kill a squaw?”

His arm fell powerless at his side.  The conciliating smile of an innocent female, appealing to the magnanimity of a warrior, reached the heart of the savage and subdued the barbarity of his soul.

Captain Heald and his wife, by the aid and influence of To-pa-na-hee and Kee-po-tah, were put into a bark canoe and paddled by the chief of the Pottawatomies and his wife to Mackinaw, three hundred miles distant, along the eastern coast of Lake Michigan, and delivered to the British commander.  They were kindly received and afterward sent as prisoners to Detroit, where they were finally exchanged.

Lieutenant Helm was wounded in the action and taken prisoner.  He was afterward taken by some friendly Indians to Au Sable, and from thence to St. Louis, and was liberated from captivity through the intervention of Mr. Thomas Forsyth, an Indian trader.  Mrs. Helm was slightly wounded in the ankle, and had her horse shot from under her, when assailed by the savage from whom Black Partridge rescued her.  After passing through many trying scenes and ordeals, she was finally taken to Detroit and subsequently joined her husband.  The soldiers, with their wives and children, were dispersed among the Pottawatomies on the Illinois, the Wabash and the Rock Rivers, and some were taken to Milwaukee.  In the following spring, they were principally collected at Detroit and ransomed.  A part of them, however, remained in captivity another year, and during that period experienced more kindness than they or their friends had expected.

Captain Wells, the intrepid leader of the Miamies, remained with the Americans after his warriors fled and fell in the massacre.  On the spot where this massacre occurred a little over two generations ago, now stands a city, whose growth is one of the marvels in the history of the progress of our great nation within the present century.  It is the centre of a railway system connecting the East with the West by fully twelve thousand miles of railroad, all tributary to Chicago; and that city, which was only the germ of a small village fifty years ago, now has more than a million inhabitants, and is the great grain market of the western continent.