Note 633 — Chapter XI · THE FATE OF THE SURVIVORS

Helm's narrative of the massacre, Appendix VI; letter of Forsyth to Heald, January 2, 1813, supra, note 632; Forsyth to John Kinzie, September 24, 1812, in Magazine of History, March, 1912, p. 89.

[634] In Wau Bun, p. 187, occurs a moving story of Mrs. Helm's journey from Detroit to Fort George on the Niagara frontier. It represents that Helm rejoined his wife in Detroit, where both were arrested by order of the British commander and sent on horseback in the dead of winter through Canada to Fort George. No official appeared charged with their reception, and on their arrival they were forced to sit waiting outside the gate for more than an hour, without food or shelter, notwithstanding the fact that Mrs. Helm was a delicate woman and the weather was most cold and inclement. When Colonel Sheaffe learned of this brutal inhospitality he expressed his indignation over it, and treated the prisoners kindly until they were exchanged, when they made their way to their friends in New York. Aside from the improbability that Helm, finding himself safe among his own countrymen at St. Louis, would voluntarily go to Detroit to become a prisoner of the British, the truth of Mrs. Kinzie's detailed narration is disproved by the explicit statement of Helm in his narrative of the massacre that after separating from his wife near the fort on the day of the massacre they met again at his father's home in the state of New York, "she having arrived seven days before me after being separated seven months and one week."