Great Leader: Black Hoof of the Shawnee

Not all Natives or Native tribes stood on one side or another of a single issue in frontier times.  Some leaders believed that all out resistance to White encroachment was the only way to preserve their way of life.  Others tried to coexist.  However, many moved along a spectrum of resistance to cooperation and back as circumstances and their people's needs dictated.

Black Hoof (c 1740-1831) was a civil chief of the Shawnee of the Ohio Valley.  He was a member of the Mekoche division, and as a young man fought as fiercely as any Shawnee warrior could against the Settlers.  He claimed to have been present at Braddock's Defeat on the Monongahela in 1755, though no Shawnee were recorded as being present.  Not much else is known of his life prior to 1795 and the end of the Northwest Indian War.  Speculation places him among the Shawnees led from Pennsylvania by Peter Chartier, whom we've already run across, in the 1740's, drifting through Kentucky before finally living for a time in Illinois.  Most likely, Black Hoof was present at the Battle of Point Pleasant, which ended Lord Dunmore's War in 1774.  What is certain is that he was among those leaders who surrendered to Mad Anthony Wayne at the conclusion of the Northwest Indian War in 1795.

Although he came to believe that co-existence and cultural adaptation was the only means of dealing with Whites, Black Hoof steadfastly refused to sign any treaties ceding away Shawnee land.  On the other hand, he also opposed armed resistance, and urged he majority of his people not to become involved in Tecumseh's movement.  He continued to work to keep his people in Ohio, dying in St. John's in 1831, before Removal forced the remaining Shawnees to Kansas and then to Oklahoma.