Customer Reviews

Blue Jacket: Warrior of the Shawnees (American Indian Lives)

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Blue Jacket is an exciting authoritative biography of a Shawnee war chief of great military, diplomatic, strategic and political achievements. Compared with other Native American leaders such as Red Cloud, Geronimo, Crazy Horse, and Sitting Bull, Blue Jacket, or Waweyapiersenwaw is portrayed as a Shawnee patriot and defender of his tribe's Ohio River territory.Unafraid to utilize white and mixed blood connections(he married two wives of white or mixed Native American/white blood), Blue Jacket provided inspiration and a role model for the famous Tecumseh in his later years. Covering an estimated lifespan from 1743 to 1808, the biography details a fully human portrait of Blue Jacket with fine details drawn from a variety of close sources.

Many examples of Blue Jacket's skill and astuteness are given. The precarious position of the Shawnees, between the British, the French, and enemy tribes is well documented. A reputation for handling disagreements among allies also is characteristic of Blue Jacket. Respected by Native Americans and Europeans alike, Blue Jacket's conduct throughout his life was characterized by a balance of abilities, traditional religion, warring and hunting skills, and also an ability to prosper from the additions of white culture. An example of an attempt to analyze Blue Jacket's political support of Tecumseh and the Prophet is quoted: "And so in the early days of the movement of Tecumseh and the Prophet, Blue Jacket illustrated its capacity to attract differently minded men and women, people who saw advantages in one way or another.Blue Jacket probably saw the sense in much of what the Prophet said, but we cannot suppose that these arguments were sufficient inducements for the most sophisticated of all Shawnees. We can, however, only guess at his motives. We know he was ambitious; he always had been. We know, too, that he was isolated, living apart from the center of Shawnee affairs in Ohio and seldom attending their tribal council. The most likely explanation of his interest in the Prophet is that he saw in him a way to recover influence and power. It was his final attempt to challenge the supremacy of Black Hoof and other old Meckoche rivals (pp. 241-242)."

The history of the Shawnee and other Native American tribes in the East is riddled with blood and lost ground. However, this biography of Blue Jacket testifies to a man who straddled cultures and achieved a level of both success and bitterness. Most interesting of all is the legacy of blood that he fathered, traced in meticulous detail by authentic sources by author Sugden. Although it may suffer from the loss of a Native American voice, Blue Jacket presents a piecing together of a lost portrait, powerful and sure. It provides a missing piece of history. "Today, most people's perception of American Indian armed resistance, itself only part of a complicated history, is extremely limited. It is the warriors of another age who are remembered - men of the later nineteenth century, whose fame has benefited from the growth of the popular press, the cinema, and improved communications. Yet Blue Jacket's followers accounted for more American enemies in serious battle than the forces of Cochise, Red Cloud, Crazy Horse, Sitting Bull, and Geronimo put together, and his vision of intertribal unity was much keener and more sophisticated. Of course, we are all products of our own times, but when the long roll of Indian notables is called, surely the name of Waweyapiersenwaw, or Blue Jacket, deserves to find its place. (pp.263-64)."

Nancy Lorraine, Reviewer

Sugden's third book on the Shawnee tribe (Tecumseh's Last Stand and Tecumseh: A Life being the other two) is a competent piece of historical writing, but is, in my view, the weakest of the three. Sugden does a fairly good job of debunking the belief that Blue Jacket was a white man, presenting a variety of materials to counter the dubious evidence usually cited by those who support this contention. While diehard believers will not be convinced, Sugden will likely influence those who do not cling to this old (and widely accepted) tale.

As for the bulk of the book, Sugden does a fair job of collecting the bits and pieces of Blue Jacket's history and weaving them into a readable narrative. The difficulty he (or anyone in the future who wishes to explore Blue Jacket's life) faces is that there is too little material available to produce a thorough biography of this Shawnee. Compared to other Shawnees of the same time frame such as Tecumseh, Tenskwatawa (the Prophet), or even Black Hoof, there is little in the historical record about Blue Jacket, certainly when one is attempting to write a full-length biography.

Perhaps if Sugden had published this as an article (or series thereof) or incorporated Blue Jacket's story within the framework of a larger tribal or regional history, the holes in Blue Jacket's history would be less gaping. However, the lack of source material forces Sugden to draw conclusions and make some speculations based on suspect evidence and assumptions. For example, little is known about Blue Jacket before the American Revolution. Sugden uses the few sources available from the American colonial period, but is forced to fill in holes with generalizations about what is known about the Shawnee and their neighbors. This weakens the biography because Blue Jacket the individual is often lost in these generalities.

On the positive side, Sugden presents, to this point, the most complete biography of Blue Jacket. The only other widely available biography is Allan Eckert's: Blue Jacket: War Chief of the Shawnees, which, while more vibrant and perhaps better written, is subject to broad speculation by the author, fosters the highly suspect Swearingen (captive white) connection, and is more literature than history. Therefore, Sugden's book is currently the best if one wishes to learn about the historical Blue Jacket. In all fairness to the author, I am not convinced that a better book on the subject is achieveable, which is a shame because Blue Jacket may never achieve the historical status of contemporaries such as Tecumseh or Little Turtle; a place he richly deserves.

To my knowledge this is only the third Shawnee that anyone has written a book about, Tecumseh and the Prophet being the other two. An interesting time period, but I found myself yawning thru this rendition of it. Perhaps there was just too little data for the author to work with. After reading the book, Blue Jacket still seems a shadowy figure, a block of wood, a carved face on a totem pole. The author gets an A+ for research for all I know, but I wish he had found something in this story that had some charm, some mystery, or some semblence of personality.

THIS NEW BOOK BY JOHN SUGDEN IS A TRUE STORY OF THE OLD CHIEF BLUEJACKET.
HE IS A SHAWNEE INDIAN AND NOT A WHITE MAN. THE BOOK ALSO PROVES THAT THE CHIEF WAS
AN NATIVE AMERICAN, FROM THE SHAWNEE TRIBE, HIS CLAN RABBIT AND A POIQUA.
jOHN GATHERED NEW INFORMATION ONF BLUEJACKET FROM OLD CANADIAN AND ENGLISH RECORDS.
THIS BOOK TELL HIS STORY FROM BIRTH TO HIS GREATEST BATTLES, A ONLINE FAMILY SITE
[...] IS HANDLED BY THE BLUEJACKET FAMILY AND RECOMMENDS THE BOOK.
ALSO 2 NEW DNA STUDYS HAVE VALIDATED THAT HE ORGINATOR OF THE BLUJACKET FAMILY.
THANK YOU
GENE PARK
SHAWNEE ELDER

It tried to like this book, but I couldn't. This guy is just not a very good writer. He takes a very exciting period of history and makes it not so exciting. He is good at presenting facts (though some are a little shaky), but not so good at writing a story based on the facts. There are better writers dealing with this time period.