Blue Jacket, Boone & Frontier Slavery

Ownership of Black slaves pushed many of the tribal peoples of the Indian Territory (future Oklahoma) and Kansas and Missouri toward support for the Confederacy in the American Civil War. Mostly these people were Cherokee, Choctaw, Chickasaw, Creek and Seminoleof the Southeast, known by the mid-19th Century as as the “Five Civilized Tribes.” There were also Wyandot and Shawnee exiles from the Ohio Country.

Their ownership of African-American slaves was not a function of late assimilation into the broader stream of American society. Slavery was a practice of long standing among them.

In an essay on slavery on the western frontier, Kristen Epps notes a prominent Shawnee trader named Joseph Parks who led the Hog Creek band of Shawnees out of Ohio to Kansas in 1833. Parks, according to 19th Century historian Francis Parkman, Parks was a wealthy man who owned “a considerable number of slaves.” In that, he was following a trail blazed by one of the great leaders of his people in their resistance to American settlement in the Ohio River Valley: Weyapiersenwah — Blue Jacket.

Blue Jacket was the most formidable native War Captain of the 1780s and ’90s, architect of the Northwest Indian Confederacy that routed an nearly destroyed two U.S. armies sent against them before finally being defeated by General Mad Anthony Wayne in the Battle of Fallen Timbers in 1794. He was also a highly successful entrepreneur in the fur trade.

Folklore that asserted that he was a white captive named Marmaduke van Swearingen has been convincingly debunked; he was a native Shawnee, a patriot and a militant.

He was not, however, a hidebound traditionalist or a mystical revivalist, rejecting the culture of the white man. On the contrary, he readily adopted and adapted aspects of European culture. According to whites who knew him in the 1780s and ’90s, he lived in a fine house, raised livestock and trafficked in whiskey. He ate with silver implements and made love to his beautiful Métis (French/Shawnee) wife on a soft, four-poster bed. (He had earlier married a white captive from Virginia and fathered two sons by her). His sons were formally educated by the British in Detroit.

And, like many of his counterparts and adversaries in Kentucky — men of wealth and standing — he owned African slaves.

The “peculiar institution” was a pervasive part of frontier life. It was not universally accepted among the Ohio Indians, and the native peoples adopted some African slaves who escaped from bondage. But some, like Blue Jacket, enthusiastically adopted the practice of buying and selling people of African descent.

Slavery was a fundamental part of the settlement of Kentucky from the very beginning, although it is not given prominent play in most tellings of the tale. Daniel Boone was a slaveowner. So was Simon Kenton.

Historian Lynn Morrow notes that:

Boone’s first attempt to settle in Kentucky was with wealthy slaveholder William Russell in 1773. Russell’s settlement was Castle Wood on the Clinch River, where several slaves were employed and where Boone marshaled a group to explore Kentucky. At Castle Wood young adventurers joined Boone, including Russell’s son Henry and Russell-owned slaves, while William stayed behind to follow with a second party.

Once in Kentucky, supplies ran low and Boone sent his son James, Henry Russell, two slaves, Adam and Charles, and others back for provisions. While returning to Castle Wood, in October 1773, Indians attacked the party, killing most of them and torturing James Boone and Henry Russell to death. Slave Adam, hidden in the woods, witnessed all of it, and later reported the gory details.

The Boone party retreated to the Clinch River where they remained for the next couple of years.

Boone’s most constant companion on many hunts in his old age in Missouri was an enslaved man named Derry Coburn, owned by Daniel’s son Daniel Morgan Boone. Morgan essentially assigned Coburn to the role, as his father could not be dissuaded from getting out into the woods to hunt and trap, well into his 70s. These were not just daytime excursions — they were long hunts. Coburn accompanied Boone on an 1811 hunt that may have gone as far west as the Yellowstone country.

An enslaved man named Monk Estill — a man skilled in the critical art of manufacturing gunpowder — played a key role in a furious firefight in the Kentucky canebrakes the violent year of 1782.

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Slavery in the backcountry and Upper South was not the same as the plantation slavery of the Deep South. Most slaveowners owned a few slaves, who worked along with family members on farms and in gristmills, and sometimes became skilled tradesmen, like blacksmiths and wheelwrights.

Many of the early American settlers in Missouri came from Kentucky — as Boone did — and they brought slaves with them. Missouri became a slave state, with the economy and culture of the western counties strongly resembling its Kentucky origins. Missourians pushed into Kansas after 1854 to assert slavery through “popular sovereignty,” kicking off years of low-intensity warfare that would give the region the name “Bleeding Kansas.”

And many descendants of fierce adversaries in the frontier wars over Kentucky and the Ohio River country would find themselves on the same side in another fierce conflict, defending an economy and way of life they had inherited or adopted together, one based on human bondage.

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Note: There are no images that I could find of Derry Coburn. The image of Monk Estill is, I believe, spurious. While these men were trusted and important parts of frontier households, they have been largely invisible to history.