Blue Jacket: Warrior of the Shawnees

By John Sugden

0-8032-9302-X

362 pages, softcover: $19.95

Reviewed by George Larrabee

NOT. Was NOT. I write these letters in capitals for emphasis. Blue Jacket, the famous Shawnee war chief, was not “a full blooded white man.” Did not begin life as someone named “Marmaduke van Sweringen.” Myth. No basis in fact. Blue Jacket was a full-blooded Shawnee. I wouldn’t mind having a dollar for every time, for years on the living history scene, someone told me that the chief “was really a full-blooded white man” (named Marmaduke van Sweringen), who had been taken as a youth, willingly adopted into the Shawnee Nation and had adapted so well that he rose to become “chief of the Shawnees” in the post-Revolutionary frontier period. Dr. Sugden’s excellent study makes abundantly clear Blue Jacket’s reality as an outstanding representative of the native American people and of the Shawnee Nation in particular.

Not only does Sugden scotch the “Marmaduke van Sweringen” myth, but also he also credits Blue Jacket with his actual role as the paramount war chief in the victories over the armies of Hamar and St. Clair in what is now Ohio, which historians have hitherto credited to the Miami chief Little Turtle. In these battles, part of the new American government’s campaign to drive out the native people (many of whom were already exiles from the east, such as the Lenape´), the chiefs of “Old Northwest” nations such as the Potawatomi, Shawnee, Miami and Delaware formed a confederation to resist the incessant encroachments of the “Big Knives.” Not an hereditary civil chief, Waweyapielsenwaw (Blue Jacket), having already risen to the rank of the Pekowi division’s war chief, became the primary leader of the alliance in the 1790s, particularly in the bloody defeat of St. Clair, the “Battle of the Thousand Slain.” Together with Little Turtle, his warriors “inflicted greater losses on the American army than those of Cochise, Geronimo, Red Cloud, Crazy Horse, and Sitting Bull combined.”

How is it that such an accomplished chief became so badly misunderstood in reputation and published histories, until now? The fault seems to lie with his having descendants who were (partly) Caucasian, thanks to his having taken a white captive and a French Metis´ to wife when he was young. Margaret Moore was a young captive who grew up to marry Blue Jacket and give birth to several children. When she returned to the whites, he married the Shawnee/French daughter of the trader Jaques Duperont Baby, with whom he fathered more children. When the journalist Thomas Jefferson Larsh, writing in the Ohio State Journal in 1877, concocted the van Sweringen mythology, Blue Jacket’s scattered descendants were unable to contradict the tale, and some even thought it might be true, knowing that they were, indeed, part white.

Other writers took up the theme in popularized, romantic histories, while serious historians waged an uphill battle to bring out the truth. In the 20th century, the most prominent popularizer of the van Sweringen legend was historical novelist Alan Eckert in his 1967 The Frontiersmen and more recent works. Layered onto this was the propensity of historians to give Little Turtle the credit for the victories over Gens. Hamar and St. Clair, assigning to Blue Jacket the onus for the defeat at the hands of “Mad Anthony” Wayne in the Battle of Fallen Timbers. Little Turtle had an American official, his white son-in-law William Wells, a captive who later became a U.S. Indian agent, as a collaborator and champion.

Wells is described by Sugden as “voluble but unreliable.” He and the Miami chief propagated the fame of Little Turtle at the expense of Blue Jacket, Little Turtle having “thrown in the towel” and become a U.S. collaborator after the Fallen Timbers defeat. Before the fight Little Turtle indeed seems to have believed, in view of the relentless advance of Wayne’s well-equipped, sternly disciplined, better-armed Legion, that resistance was futile. While he participated as a warrior in the battle, he didn’t mind Blue Jacket’s militant leadership taking the blame for the reverse. His subsequent prestige was enhanced by giving him credit for the victories over Hamar and St. Clair once he had caved in to American domination and while Blue Jacket remained defiant.

Sugden goes into great detail in illuminating Blue Jacket’s life, delving into native customs, methods of warfare, their diplomatic as well as military resistance and the overall effort to keep their Old Northwest lands free of the powerful invaders. The older Waweyapielsenwaw became an advisor and an inspiration to another up-and-coming Shawnee warrior, the justly famous Tecumseh. The latter’s vision of forming a vast pan-Indian alliance, forming the tribes into a united states of their own, was inspired by the older war-chief, who had headed the Old Northwest area alliance while it lasted. The deceased Blue Jacket’s warrior sons, Jim and George Blue-Jacket, fought alongside Tecumseh in resisting the U.S. invasion of Canada in the War of 1812.

In 1997 Sugden published a similar work, his Tecumseh, A Life (previously reviewed in this journal), which goes into the great 19th century war chief’s life in as exhaustive detail as Blue Jacket, Tecumseh put him on the trail of uncovering the real story of Blue Jacket, who, by the way, didn’t always wear a blue coat and sometimes attended councils wearing a scarlet coat, with shoulder epaulets and red leggings.

It was in Sugden’s Tecumseh that I had the pleasure of finding an historical precedent for my own native American nickname of “Peskunck,” which is derived from a New England-region Algonquian dialect. The young Tecumseh’s older brother, usually known as Cheeseekau, was also known as “Pepquannakek” and “Popoquan.” The first indicates “Gun Shot.” Popoquan means “Gun,” doubtless because of Cheeseekau’s frequent or expert use of his musket in hunting and warfare (38). By way of Algonquian language-family affinity, “Peskunck” also means “gun,” being related to the Abenaki “baskhigan,” “a gun, an exploding or shooting instrument” (Dr. Gordon Day, Western Abenaki Dictionary, Vol. II, 1994, 177). There is no telling what far-ranging trails you will be set upon once you have entered upon the adventure of delving into Dr. Sugden’s early American frontier.

Blue Jacket: Warrior of the Shawnees by John Sugden was published by University of Nebraska Press in Lincoln, Nebraska. It is available through bookstores and online at <http://unp.unl.edu/>.