It’s not fair.
It just plain downright is not fair!
Our romantic historical myths keep being abolished, under close scrutiny. People simply don’t know what to believe any more.
Our Simon Kenton bridge is NOT a Roebling bridge, though Roebling’s son’s company built part of it.
No one can say Daniel Boone, sometime Maysville resident and tavern owner, and erstwhile mill operator, carved his initials in the huge stone at the public landing, or that the D B carved there even represents Daniel.
It truly, simply, is not fair.
OK, I see you wondering. what is old Billy talking about now?
Well, now, we learn from George Larrabee’s review of John Sugden’s “Blue Jacket: Warrior of the Shawnee,” published in the January/February 2005 issue of Muzzleloader, kindly lent to us by artist Steve White, a stickler for accuracy and detail if ever there was one, that “Blue Jacket 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.”
The worst blow of all to local fans of Allan Eckert’s very popular book, The Frontiersmen, (1967) and more recent works, is that Eckert’s version of Blue Jacket’s surrendering to the Shawnee to save his brother’s life, and because he had always wanted to live with, and be, a Shawnee, simply isn’t, according to Sugden’s research and writings, true.
As someone in Pogo phrases it, “I repeats,” it simply isn’t true.
Larrabee goes on: “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.”
[Uh-oh! There’s another myth that needs talking about! Though Larrabee did not write “Native-American,” he came perilously close to it. There was/is nothing native to America about Indians. They were all emigrants to North American just as those who came from Germany, Italy, China, different parts of Africa, Japan, France or the British Isles and Ireland are. The only difference is that the Indians didn’t have to come by boat, as they crossed over the land bridge between Siberia and what is now Alaska. Natives, indeed!]
Back to Larrabee: “Not only does Sugden scotch the ‘Marmaduke van Sweringen’ myth, but also he 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, hitherto credited to Little Turtle.”
Sugden explains, as Larrabee writes, how this probably came about. “The fault seems to lie with [Blue Jacket’s] having descendants who were (partly) Caucasian, thanks to his having taken a white captive and a French metis (sic) 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 the journalist Thomas Jefferson Larsh, writing in the Ohio State Journal in 1877, concocted the van Sweringen mythology, Blue Jacket’s descendants were unable to contradict the tale, and some even thought it might be true, knowing that they were, indeed, part white.”
Sugden tells us, “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. While Little Turtle participated 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.”
Larrabee continues, “In 1997, Sugden published a similar work, his Tecumseh, A Life, 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 sometime attended councils wearing a scarlet coat, with shoulder epaulets and red leggings.”
The ultimate irony — in the heyday of CB radios at the time your Museum Center was being renovated and reopened, this writer used “Blue Jacket” as his call name.
Future columns: Given that Keeneland is open, and the Derby coming up, early local horse racing lore and information.
And, how the Kathleen Savage Browning Miniatures Collection is being augmented for your future viewing and educational pleasure, in a visit to the International Guild of Miniature Artisans’ show in New York City.
© Museum Center, Maysville, Ky.
(EDITOR’S NOTE: Readers may email questions to Hixson@masoncountymuseum.org)
