George Ronan

Ensign George Ronan was a commissioned officer of the United States Army. Educated at West Point and commissioned as an officer in the 1st Infantry Regiment in 1811,

Military service George Ronan attended the United States Military Academy for almost three years, from June 1808 to March 1811. At the time Ronan matriculated, the fledgling institute of military education was six years old, and he accepted his commission in the academy's ninth year. A trickle of shako-clad

On the North American Great Lakes, the years immediately prior to the breakout of the War of 1812 were characterized by increasingly embittered competition between British-Canadian fur traders and American merchants, including traders aligned with the interest of the powerful John Jacob Astor of the American Fur Company. Native Americans who were embedded in British-aligned fur trading and kinship networks were aware of the advance of the American frontiersmen into southern Indiana and Illinois Territory. Although Ronan did not know it, his 1811-1812 assignment to Fort Dearborn was a duty posting to a spark point.

Ronan is described by survivors as a high-spirited young ensign who did not get along well with his commanding officer, fort commander Captain Nathan Heald. Heald, possibly in retaliation, ordered Ronan to undertake a series of increasingly dangerous operations outside the fort walls in ultimately futile efforts to knit together the tiny band of French-speaking, English-speaking, and Native American-speaking farmers and traders who lived in cabins scattered up and down the Chicago River. When war broke out, Heald received orders to evacuate his post and remove his garrison to Fort Wayne, Indiana. The news of the fort's evacuation, scheduled for August 15, 1812, emboldened the Chicago "British band" of Potawatomi, who took a position two miles south of the doomed stockade along the shore of Lake Michigan. On the morning of August 15, Ronan's attempt to help lead a knot of civilian refugees part of the overall 93-person column of evacuees ran into an ambush. Witnesses saw Ronan continuing to struggle even after suffering a mortal wound, and he allegedly accounted for two hostile warriors before his death.

Legacy Survivors believed that the spot where Ensign George Ronan was struck down was at or close to what later became the intersection of 21st Street and Indiana Avenue, located in the Prairie Avenue neighborhood of Chicago's Near South Side. As an "ensign", the lowest rank of commissioned officer in 1811–1812, Ronan held a rank equivalent to that of the subsequent rank of second lieutenant, and is sometimes referred to as such.