Charles Bluejacket
Charles Bluejacket, also known as Reverend or Chief Bluejacket, was a distinguished member of the Shawnee who served as official interpreter and head chief of the Shawnee. Charles Bluejacket worked to ease tensions between the Shawnee and the white settlers who emigrated to Johnson County and the surrounding region throughout the 1850s.
According to Shawnee oral tradition, a blue shirt worn by Marmaduke Van Swearingen when he was captured by the Shawnee was the source for the family’s surname. Van Swearingen — Charles Bluejacket's grandfather — was taken captive and adopted by the Shawnee in the 1770s. The tradition holds that Van Swearingen married a Shawnee woman and moved to Ohio to live with the Shawnee. It was also believed that Charles Bluejacket inherited the jacket and took it with him when he moved to Indian Territory in the 1870s.
Charles Bluejacket, was born in Michigan in 1816 or 1817. He attended Quaker mission schools in Ohio and the Baptist Mission School in Johnson County. Upon completion of his education in 1834, Bluejacket quickly distinguished himself as a tribal leader, a respected Methodist minister, and a prosperous farmer.
Charles Bluejacket developed an extensive farm and orchard and built a large two-story residence located near Quivira Road and 51st Street. The owner and his property were featured in a nineteenth-century publication “Herald of Freedom”:
...Tonight I am with Mr. Charles Bluejacket, a Shawnee Indian. For the benefit of many of your readers, who think all Indians are savage and heathenish, I will give them a description of Mr. Bluejacket's farm, dwellings, etc. He has a beautiful farm of several hundred acres under improvement, subdivided into fields. His dwellings is a frame house 20x40, two stories high, plastered and painted, furnished in a style that would do credit to many of our wealthy people in the old states. Mr. Bluejacket is quite a gentleman in his manners ...
Bluejacket frequently represented the Shawnee in land or property settlements and was listed as the interpreter at the treaty negotiations held in Washington, D.C., in 1854. His efforts on their behalf continued after 1854, when he protested taxes imposed on the Shawnee by Johnson County. The county government sought to sell a portion of the Shawnee's lands, but Charles Bluejacket successfully argued the case before the United States Supreme Court to establish the rights of the Shawnee as an independent nation.
Charles Bluejacket and his family remained in Johnson County through the mid-1870s, but he eventually joined his fellow Shawnee in the Indian Territory (now Oklahoma). More myth than fact, however, surrounds knowledge about his last days. According to Shawnee oral tradition, Charles Bluejacket returned to Kansas in 1897 to help descendants locate the burial place of a Shawnee leader Tenskwatawa (the Shawnee Prophet). During the search for the burial site in the Argentine area of Kansas City, Kansas, he contracted pneumonia and died shortly afterward. He was buried in the Bluejacket Cemetery in Oklahoma. Another Bluejacket Cemetery, where descendants and other Shawnee are buried, is located at 59th Terrace, one block east of Nieman Road in Shawnee.
ALBUM vol. 8, no. 2 (winter 1994)