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The Battle of Fort Dearborn (also known as the Fort Dearborn Massacre) was an engagement between United States troops and Potawatomi Native Americans that occurred on August 15, 1812, near Fort Dearborn in what is now Chicago, Illinois, but was then part of the Illinois Territory. The battle, which occurred during the War of 1812, followed the evacuation of the fort as ordered by William Hull, commander of the United States Army of the Northwest. The battle lasted about 15 minutes and resulted in a complete victory for the Native Americans. Fort Dearborn was burned down and those soldiers and settlers who survived were taken captive. Some were later ransomed. After the battle, however, settlers continued to seek to enter the area, the fort was rebuilt in 1816, and settlers and the government were now convinced that all Indians had to be removed from the territory, far away from the settlement. ==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 frontiersmen, known as the Western Confederacy, turned over to the United States large parts of modern-day Ohio, and various other parcels of land including 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 Native American nations and the United States since the passage of the Northwest Ordinance in 1787.〔Ordinance for the Government of the Territory of the United States North-West of the River Ohio〕 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 Native American nations as valuable allies and a buffer to its Canadian colonies and provided them 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, mineral deposits and fur trade areas 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 a 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.〔Nathan Heald's Journal, reproduced in 〕 As the United States and Britain moved towards war, antipathy between the settlers and Native Americans in the Chicago area increased. In the summer of 1811, British emissaries tried to enlist the support of Native Americans 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 Native American agent. Fifteen men from the civilian population were organized into a militia by Captain Heald, and armed with guns and ammunition from the fort.〔 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Battle of Fort Dearborn」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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