BLUE JACKET, WARRIOR OF THE SHAWNEES. By John Sugden. University of Nebraska Press. 350 pages. $29.95.

Although the Shawnee Indian tribe played an important role in early Ohio frontier history, only two of its leaders have been widely written about: the warrior-diplomat Tecumseh and his brother, a religious leader known as the Prophet.

Now John Sugden, who wrote a workmanlike biography of Tecumseh in 1998, has given us an account of Blue Jacket, war chief of the Shawnees during the Ohio Indian wars and a leader of the Indian confederacy defeated by Gen. Anthony Wayne at the Battle of Fallen Timbers in 1794.

Blue Jacket lived from about 1743 to 1808, and in his later years made his home on the Detroit River. As a military strategist, the Shawnee chief has been regarded as inferior to Little Turtle, war chief of the allied Miami Indian tribe, a thesis Sugden tries to disprove.

The author writes, “Blue Jacket, the warrior and diplomat who is the subject of this book, has been clouded by mythology. Most writers have portrayed him as subsidiary, even a discredited figure, and even denied that he was an Indian at all. He was, they said, a white man, captured and raised by the Shawnees."

That story stems from an 1877 story in a Columbus newspaper asserting that Blue Jacket was Marmaduke Van Sweringen, a white teenager captured by the Shawnees during the Revolutionary War. Sugden asserts that Blue Jacket was too old to have been been Van Sweringen.

Sugden points out that hundreds of thousands of visitors to Xenia, Ohio, have sat happily through a pageant, Blue Jacket, White Shawnee War Chief, which embraces this legend. “Of course,” he adds, “historical accuracy is not a necessary condition of public entertainment.”

The legend does not ring true in the face of Sugden's research. The Shawnee chief was married twice, once to a white woman who was for a time captive of the Shawnees, and then to a woman of mixed French and Indian ancestry. Blue Jacket's descendants, some of them still living, bear his name, the origin of which is unknown, and are of mixed racial ancestry. That may have fueled the legend that Blue Jacket was a white man.

The author had an easier time tracing the life of Tecumseh, who lived at the same time but met many more Europeans who wrote their impressions of him. An experienced warrior Blue Jacket may have been, but Sugden says he quickly saw the value of making peace with the Americans after the battle of Fallen Timbers.

Blue Jacket was, Sugden writes, one of the earlier militants to parley with Wayne at Greenville. The chief also was a member of a delegation of Indians who visited Philadelphia and had an audience with President Washington in 1796.

The author tells of a visit the aging chief made to the home of Ohio Gov. Thomas Worthington at Adena. He stood on the front porch gazing over the countryside, as a visitor can do to this day, and told his host that the blood shed in the defense of the land for 60 years filled his heart with sorrow.

Unfortunately, assuming the story is accurate, there are few such moments that give readers a flesh-and-blood glimpse of the man. Despite Sugden's efforts, Blue Jacket remains a shadowy figure. What he did or did not do is shrouded in the mists of time and a historical record that paid only passing attention to the Indians being dispossessed on the Old Northwest frontier.

The book is hard going in many places, but we are not likely to get a much clearer picture of the Shawnee leader who for years fought vainly to maintain his people's villages in Ohio, which was then the American frontier.

Ralph Johnson is a retired editorial director of The Blade.

First Published June 9, 2001, 2:43 p.m.