Note 350 — Chapter VI · THE FOUNDING OF FORT DEARBORN
Reading edition
Michigan Pioneer Collections, XX, 342, 347.
[351] Kinzie, Wau Bun, 349.
[352] Hurlbut, Chicago Antiquities, 67. Kinzie is a corruption of the Scotch name Mackenzie, which was the name of Kinzie's father.
[353] Hurlbut, Chicago Antiquities, 469.
[354] Kinzie had formed an earlier connection with a woman of the same family name as his own, Margaret McKenzie. The story that has been handed down to us of her career, while doubtless idealized through dint of repetition, well illustrates the possibilities for adventure of life on the American border a century and a quarter ago. In the course of Lord Dunmore's war, Margaret and Elizabeth McKenzie were carried away from their Virginia home into captivity among the Indians. The children were adopted by a Shawnee chief who lived near the Indian town of Chillicothe in western Ohio. Years later, when they had grown to womanhood, Margaret, the elder, accompanied her foster parent on a hunting expedition to the vicinity of the modern Fort Wayne, Indiana. Here a young brave sought to force her to marry him. Spurning his attentions, she mounted a horse by night and fled through the forest a distance of seventy-five miles to her Indian home. The horse is said to have died from the effects of the wild ride, but the maiden was made of sterner stuff. At length Margaret McKenzie became the wife of John Kinzie, and her sister, Elizabeth, the wife of a Scotchman named Clark. Whether the two white men rescued the women from captivity and were rewarded for this service by their respective hands, or the old chief voluntarily brought them to Detroit on a visit, where the marriages were brought about in the usual way, depends upon which faction of Kinzie's descendants tells the story. So, too, it is still a matter of dispute whether or not the union was cemented by a formal marriage ceremony. Whatever the truth in these respects may be, the unions endured for a number of years, two children being born to the Clarks and three to the Kinzies. With the restoration of peace to the northwestern frontier in 1795 Isaac McKenzie, the father, learned of the whereabouts of his long-lost children. He journeyed to Detroit to see them, and when he returned to his home in Virginia his daughters with their children accompanied him, leaving their woodland husbands behind.
Conflicting explanations, colored in each case by partisan pride, have been given of the reasons for this untimely breaking-up of the two families. Since the only evidence in the premises is family tradition, it seems vain to seek to determine where the truth lies. Margaret Kinzie later married Benjamin Hall, while her sister became the wife of Jonas Clybourne. Two of the former's children by Kinzie, James and Elizabeth, in later years came to Chicago; so, too, did the Halls and the Clybournes; and these various family groups comprised a considerable proportion of the population of Chicago in the later twenties. On the subject of this footnote see Blanchard, The Northwest and Chicago; Hurlbut, Chicago Antiquities; Andreas, Chicago; Gordon, John Kinzie, the "Father of Chicago." For obvious reasons the Kinzie family historian makes no mention in Wau Bun of this feature of her father-in-law's career. Mr. Clarence M. Burton has a genealogy (MS) of the Kinzie family to which descendants respectively of John Kinzie's first and second families have contributed their views concerning the legitimacy of the former.