Blue jacket

Blue Jacket or Weyapiersenwah (* around 1743 , † around 1810 ) was a war chief of the Shawnee and lived in the Ohio Country . He was one of the most successful Indian leaders in the Northwest Indian War (1785–1795), in the course of which allied Indian tribes fought against the young United States .

Life

Little is known about the youth blue jackets. It is first mentioned in a report by the British missionary David Jones, who visited the Shawnee villages on the Scioto River in 1773 , which also included Blue Jackets Town on Deer Creek. The following year, Blue Jacket took part in the Battle of Point Pleasant and fought on the side of the British in the American Revolutionary War. As a result of the British defeat in the Revolutionary War, the Shawnee lost their most important ally in the fight for their land rights in the Ohio area . A number of treaties between the Americans and Indians, such as the Treaties of Fort McIntosh in 1785 and Fort Harmar in 1789, redefined the boundaries of Indian land. Some tribes, including the Shawnee, Mingo, and Delaware , did not give up resistance to the white invaders, which led to the Northwest Indian War.

Portrait of Arthur St. Clair

An alliance of several Indian tribes under the chiefs Blue Jacket and Little Turtle inflicted a devastating defeat on the Americans under Governor Arthur St. Clair on November 4, 1791 in the battle of the Wabash River , which was a serious setback for the United States in the fight against the Indian tribes of the northwest meant. It was not until 1795, after the Indians lost the Battle of Fallen Timbers , that the war was decided in favor of the United States. Blue Jacket was one of the signatories of the Greenville Treaty of August 3, 1795, in which the Shawnee had to cede most of their land in Ohio to the Americans.

After that, Blue Jacket lived for a time near Fort Wayne , later he moved to the Auglaize River and around 1801 he was to be found on the Detroit River . He undoubtedly also visited Fort Malden, today's Amherstburg , because it was there that the British distributed gifts to the Indians south of the Canadian border. In July 1805 he signed the Fort Industry Treaty, in which parts of northern Ohio were ceded to the Americans. He made the acquaintance of Tecumseh and the prophet Tenskwatawa at an early age and lived temporarily in their vicinity in Greenville . In 1807 Blue Jacket visited the Ohio government in Chillicothe as one of the Indian delegates.

Web links

• Blue Jacket website
• Blue jacket
• Weyapiersenwah . In: Dictionary of Canadian Biography . 24 volumes, 1966–2018. University of Toronto Press, Toronto ( English , French ).

Individual evidence

1. ↑ ^{a b c d} Weyapiersenwah. Retrieved September 7, 2010 .