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Shawnee leader of the Northwestern Confederacy
On the record
Named with Little Turtle and Buckongahelas in the destruction of St. Clair’s army on 4 November 1791 — near modern Fort Recovery, Ohio, not at Fort Wayne, though the two are often conflated locally.
Blue Jacket — Weyapiersenwah — was born about 1743 in the Ohio country and died about 1810. He appears in the record by 1773 already a Shawnee war chief, fought through Dunmore's War and the Revolution on the British-allied side, and with Little Turtle and the Delaware chief Buckongahelas he shared the leadership of the confederacy that destroyed St. Clair's army on 4 November 1791. He signed the Treaty of Greenville in 1795 and the Treaty of Fort Industry in 1805, and stands in the record as Tecumseh's predecessor as the Shawnee leader of armed resistance. One story about him does not survive checking: the tale, published in 1877 and popularized in Allan W. Eckert's novels, that Blue Jacket was a white captive named Marmaduke Van Swearingen. Historians have rejected it since Helen Hornbeck Tanner's examination in 1978, his biographer John Sugden concluded in 2000 that he was Shawnee by birth, and a 2006 DNA study published in the Ohio Journal of Science, comparing descendants of Blue Jacket's son George with the Swearingen line, found no match.
Find them on this page
- § 02 — the Story of Fort Wayne section
From the timeline in § 02; Wikipedia, "Blue Jacket"; Sugden, Blue Jacket: Warrior of the Shawnees (2000); Ohio Journal of Science (September 2006), DNA study.