Lt. Franklin McDuffee was born circa 1809 in New Hampshire The McDuffee monument at the Haven Hill Cemetery in Rochster, New Hampshire, states that he died in Chicago on 15 July 1832, at age 23, which would make him born in about 1809.
1 He died on 15 July 1832 in Fort Dearborn, Chicago, Cook County, Illinois, at age ~23.
1,2,3 Early Chicago, Fort Dearborn
An address by John Wentworth
Published 1881 by Fergus Printing Company, Chicago
Pages 30-31
This brings us to the second crisis in the history of Chicago, twenty years after the [1812] massacre, when the settlers, afrightened by the depredations of Black-Hawk's warriors with their wives and children, sought refuge in the Fort.* Then the Asiatic cholera came and they fled the Fort, but dared not return to their homes, and thus they vibrated between the Indians and cholera, suffering for the necessaries of life. The War Department's records say: "Fort Dearborn having become a general hospital on July 11th [1832], no returns were received until its reoccupation; companies G and I, 2d Infantry returned to the Fort, on Oct. 1st [1832], from campaign." This refers to the march of Gen. Scott to Rock Island in pursuit of Black Hawk. Our Esquire Sauganash with his two friends, Shabonee and Chechepinqua, successfully used their influence to keep the Indians in this vicinity in amity. Some recent writers have asserted that the coffins, which I have heretofore noticed, contained the bodies of soldiers who died of the cholera at that time. But I served in Congress with Gen. Humphrey Marshall, of Kentucky, who came here with Gen. Scott, as a second-lieutenant, and helped bury the dead, among them a classmate,
Second-Lieutenant Franklin McDuffie, of Rochester, New Hampshire, who died July 15th [1832], and he [Gen. Humphrey Marshall] said the dead were thrown unceremoniously into a pit, and oftentimes those helping to carry a body there in a very few hours had to be thrown in themselves, and the soldiers and citizens afterward were afraid to remove them. Luther Nichols, who died May 2d, 1881, in this City [Chicago], was, at the time, a regularly enlisted soldier, the last to reside in our City, and helped bury the dead. He described the pit as at the north-west corner of Lake Street and Wabash Avenue. Mr. Nichols was born at Gilbertsville, Otsego County, New York, in 1805, and enlisted as a United-States soldier in 1828; came to Chicago under Major Whistler, and was honorably discharged in 1833.
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Page 69
Graduates of the Military Academy, Class of 1832, with Regiment to which Assigned, from July 1, 1832
. . .
11 *Franklin McDuffee 4th Artillery Died, July 15, 1832, at Fort Dearborn, Ill.
. . .
The asterisk indicates that he "participated in some manner in the Black-Hawk expedition of 1832."
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