Charles Blue Jacket
Charles Blue Jacket (1817–1897) was a 19th-Century Shawnee chief in Kansas, as well as a Methodist minister.
Charles Blue Jacket was the grandson of the Shawnee Chief Blue Jacket by his son George Blue Jacket. Charles' mother is not known, but believed to have been a Shawnee. His maternal grandmother was the daughter of a Shawnee lady and Jacques Dupéron Baby.
The younger Blue Jacket was born along the south banks of the Huron River in Michigan in what is today Monroe County, Michigan. However, a very short time after Blue Jacket's birth the family moved to Piqua, Ohio.
Blue Jacket was educated in the Quaker School in Piqua and mission schools in Kansas. The Blue Jacket family moved to Kansas in 1833.[1] He served as an interpreter for the United States governor and was a farmer and businessman in what is today Kansas City, Kansas and its vicinity. He raised large numbers of hogs and cattle.[2] Also in 1855 Blue Jacket and two of his brother opened a ferry in that area called Blue Jacket's crossing.
Blue Jacket served as chief of the Shawnee tribe from 1861-1864. Two of his sons served in the Union Army during the American Civil War and one of his daughters-in-law killed one of the raiders under William Quantrill who had invaded her home.
Blue Jacket moved to Oklahoma with most of the other Shawnees in 1869. Blue Jacket, Oklahoma received its name because he settled nearby, and he served as post master there as well as the minister of the Methodist Church in that town.
Sources
- ↑ article on Blue Jacket
- ↑ John P. Bowes. Exiles and Pioneers: Eastern Indians in the Trans-Mississippi West. (Cambridge University Press, 2007) p. 230