Did It Happen: Blue Jacket's White Ancestry

The 1994 Canadian made-for-TV movie "Tecumseh: the Last Warrior" features a subplot involving Shawnee leader Blue Jacket.  According to the movie, Blue Jacket was a United States soldier who deserted the army after a severe whipping for something he didn't do.  He becomes friends with Tecumseh and teaches him to read and write.  He is made a chief by the Shawnee because of his experience in dealing with the Long Knives and having served in their army.  Later, he along with several other chiefs sign treaties promising away hundreds of thousand of acres of Shawnee land.  He and Tecumseh part ways.  Allan Eckerts in his Frontiersmen series also plays on this storyline.

So, was Blue Jacket really a white man named Marmaduke van Swearingen, captured as a young boy and assimilated by the Shawnee?  The short answer is no.  A word here about some early historians' need to find a White person up the family tree of every Native leader they ran across.  Apparently, full-blooded Natives were not thought able enough to stand against White generals and lead their people unless they had some British or American officer or trader in their background somewhere.  While some Native leaders such as John Ross or Osceola did have White ancestry, there is no evidence of it for leaders such as Tecumseh, Sequoyah or Blue Jacket.  Nonetheless, they were just as capable as White officers of figuring out complex military maneuvers and playing the intricate trade and diplomacy games that meant their people's survival, not to mention coming up with a system of written language.  So, when in doubt whether a Native leader carried White blood, the best resources are the tribal website or other information, modern scholarly biographies, or sometimes family history. 

Scholarly history and DNA clears Blue Jacket's name.  By the time the young boy Marmaduke was captured, Blue Jacket was an established chief.  Further, no one who ever met him described him as being mixed-race, let alone a White person.  In the 21st century, DNA tests on relatives of the two men showed that their DNA was not the same, making it unlikely that Blue Jacket and Marmaduke were the same people.  Good movie or novel plots aside, this myth is busted.