Here is another interesting peice to the "puzzle".
The Blue Jacket family is still alive and well in the Native community in Oklahoma. Blue Jacket may have been Delaware and Shawnee and part white but he was not a Van Swearingen.
Btw, for the sake of full disclosure...I am Delaware and Shawnee and part white. :rotf: Which should have nothing to do with anything. But, with some it does. :shocked2: We are Americans too. :winking:
Chief Blue Jacket's DNA all Indian, tests indicate
Report he was captured white boy is debunked
Friday, April 14, 2006
Mike Lafferty
THE COLUMBUS DISPATCH
RENEE SAUER DISPATCH
The painting The Signing of the Treaty of Green Ville, by Howard Chandler Christy, hangs just outside the Statehouse Rotunda. Blue Jacket is dressed in blue.
For more than a century, popular history has claimed that the famous American Indian chief Blue Jacket was Marmaduke Swearingen, a boy captured by the Shawnee in the mid-1700s.
But DNA testing by genetic experts in Dayton shows that Blue Jacket didn't have a Swearingen bone in his body.
He was all Indian, said Dan Krane, a forensics specialist at Wright State University.
That's good news to Robert Blue Jacket, the chief's great-great grandson.
"We have no relation with any Swearingen. There's nothing in their DNA that agrees with ours," said Blue Jacket, 76, of Tulsa, Okla.
The supposed Blue Jacket-Swearingen connection has been made famous in recent decades in Allan Eckert's book The Frontiersman, and in the summer outdoor drama Blue Jacket, which is performed in Xenia.
Krane, who owns a forensic testing company, and his colleague, Carrie Rowland, analyzed DNA from six direct male descendants of Blue Jacket, including Robert Blue Jacket. All the donors are descendants of Blue Jacket's only known son, George.
Four Swearingens also provided samples: two were direct descendants of Marmaduke Swearingen and his father, John, and two were descendants of John's great uncle.
The new DNA testing confirms a less-exact analysis performed in 2000.
The report will be presented April 22 at the annual Ohio Academy of Science meeting at the University of Dayton.
Robert van Trees, an 88-year-old Ohio historian from Fairborn who organized the tests, said he has doubted the Swearingen connection for decades.
"I'm glad we're able to provide posterity with truth," van Trees said.
The Shawnee chief was born between 1738 and 1740, according to the scientific paper written by Krane, Rowland and van Trees. Marmaduke, according to a family Bible, was born in 1763.
The paper also says that traders talked of visiting one of Blue Jacket's villages a decade before Marmaduke was born.
Van Trees blames the controversy on a story that ran in a Columbus newspaper in 1877. He said the story was repeated in later historical treatises and in books.
To sort it all out scientifically, van Trees got Krane and Rowland to perform the DNA testing.
Lacking a body - no one knows exactly where Blue Jacket's grave is in southern Michigan - van Trees spent several weeks last summer traveling the country swabbing cheeks of Blue Jackets and Swearingens, preserving the cell samples in dry ice.
Krane and Rowland examined the male Y chromosome. It mutates little and is stable from generation to generation.
"I can tell you with great confidence that John Swearingen was not (Blue Jacket's) father," Krane said.
The producers of Blue Jacket, in which the chief in battle kills a man said to be his brother, Charles Swearingen, remain nonplussed.
Art and controversy, they say, often go together and Blue Jacket is set to open its 25 th season June 16.
"We show history as it was reported 25 years ago," said Executive Director Lorrie Sparrow, "so come out and see the story of Blue Jacket."
