A COPY

Mr. Gaylord Hinshaw                     Postmarked Dayton OH 04 Jun 2001
1713 Baron Dr.
Norman Oklahoma 73071

Dear Mr. Hinshaw

 After church this morning I overheard a friend telling my husband about an article in the Dayton Daily News today which was about the opening of this year’s Blue Jacket show at Xenia, Ohio.  My husband is a descendent of Captain Van Swearingen’s brother and knows the story related in the play about his first name being Charles is not true.  Our friend mentioned your name and that you live in Norman, Oklahoma and I found your address on the internet.  I thought you would be interested in the article and am attaching it hereto.

   We have visited Fort Recovery, Ohio and seen the medallion on the monument there on which is carved the name of my husband’s cousin.  There were no other Swearingens in that battle and of course this fallen officer’s name was not Charles, his first name is “Van.”  The play at Xenia portrays the Captain as being “Charles” and killed by his brother “Marmaduke.”  This is not true and it makes one sick to see such an untruth played out before our eyes.  The now deceased librarian at Xenia, Julia Overton, and several others, have performed extensive research which indicates the story is not true.  W.  Mundell was a soldier in World War II and attended college at Waynesburg, Pennsylvania under the GI Bill.  While there he undoubtedly got a lot of his history information from a three volume work by a Mr. Horn who came from Kansas to Waynesburg where he published his work in 1945.  I understand it was called a “hoax.”  Mr. Mundell obtained part about a Captain Charles Van Swearingen being killed fro the book written by Allan Eckert and that story is not true.

   My husband said he was told you are a descendant of Chief Blue Jacket and are interested in erasing this untrue story which clouds the memory of a man who died in the service of his country. Good luck.

Yours truly

Marty Stokes

END

First Frontier, Inc., as long as the sun warms our earth, the Swearingen and Blue Jacket families will bring before the public, the truth about your false portrayals of Captian Van Swearingen and Blue Jacket.  These two gentlemen are true American Heros.  Too bad trash like you elect to use their fabulous heritage to make money.  You haven't the guts to forward a copy of this message to Mr. Terry Morris of the Dayton Daily News and ask him for some free publicity denying what is on these pages, the truth of the matter..

Gaylord Carlyle Hinshaw
Seventh Generation Descendent of Blue Jacket
Registered Member of the Shawnee Tribe
Researcher of Shawnee Tribe history
Genealogist of the Blue Jacket Family, and
Consulting Exploration Geologist
1713 Baron Dr
Norman OK 73071
405-364-4584
bjexploration@swbell.net

cc: Swearingen Family
       Blue Jacket Family
       Shawnee Tribe Historians
       Library of Congress

---

June 1, 2001

JESSE STUART FOUNDATION
P. O. Box 669
Ashland KY 41114

Foundation;

I have been apprised that your organization has published THE FROINTERSMAN, a book by Alan W. Eckert.  That book was previously published by Little, Brown, Boston, in 1967.

Hailed as the true story of the conquest of Ohio country in the late 18^th Century, Eckert’s narrative turned out to be one of his own making rather than factual history of its main personage, Waweypiesenwa, the last principal War Chief of the Shawnee Tribe.  In this book, Eckert demands that Waweypiesenwa was a captive white man with no Indian blood, rather than the Shawnee Indian that he was.  Gathering the literary world at his feet over the highly monetarily successful THE FRONTIERSMAN, Eckert parlayed his Blue Jacket (the name the British used to address Waweypiesenwa) character, , into a series of four books.  The other three are: Blue Jacket, War Chief of the Shawnees, Little, Brown and Company, Boston, 1969; A Sorrow in Our Heart, Bantam Books, New York, 1992; and The Dark and Bloody River, Bantam Books, New York, 1995.

Each of the four books utilized the same un-truthful material about Blue Jacket, even though the real facts about this great man came glaringly to light during this same time period, due to fastidious research of reliable historians and genealogists.

Eckert writes that white person Marmaduke Van Swearingen was captured at age 17 in West Virginia, was taken to the Shawnee villages in the Scioto River drainage, was adopted into the tribe, was given the name Blue Jacket and was elevated to the extremely high post of War Chief of the Shawnee Tribe.  That sequence of the events is encapsulated in all four of the above books.

Although Blue Jacket inaccuracies penned by Eckert are rife in his work, the absolute worst is his statement that Blue Jacket killed his own brother in the Battle of St. Clair’s Defeat, pitting the U. S. Army and the Kentucky Milita against a consortium of Algonquian Tribes on November 4, 1791 at the Wabash River where Fort Recovery, Ohio now stands.  A Captain Van Swearingen of the U. S. Army gave his life to his country in that battle as did some 600 others on the side of the whites.  Eckert knew of that fact and used it to concoct a lie more palatable to his pocketbook and his readers voracious need for Ripley’s Believe It or Not and Paul Harvey’s The Rest of the Story type events (They both used the white man story championed by Eckert).

It is a travesty, this thing that Eckert used to trash Captian Swearingen and his true place in real history.  The Swearingen family has been deprived of its rightful heritage since 1967 by Eckert, fought tooth and nail to preserve its true culture and here you are, trying to tell the world that you are depicting true history with your new publication.  Shame be upon you!

Helen Hornbeck Tanner, Senior Fellow of the Newberry Library in Chicago, wrote the article The Glaze in 1792, A Composite Indian Community, published in Ethnohistory, Vol. 25, No. 1, p. 18-19, in 1978.  In it, Helen showed the falsity of the Blue Jacket being a white man story.

In 1987, Robert V. Van Trees of Fairborn, Ohio advised a group of six collaborating Blue Jacket blood family genealogists of his discovery of the un-truth of the Blue Jacket/Marmaduke Van Swearingen tale and they incorporated it into their Blue Jacket GENEALOGY , 1995, now residing in the Vinita Public Library, Vinita, Oklahoma.

In 1996, Mr. Van Trees revised his book, Banks of the Wabash, 2^nd edition, Van Trees Associates, Fairborn, which is a detailed account of the 1791 battle.  In the revision, Van Trees chronicles the advent of the tale and well establishes the truth of the un-truth.

Karel L. Whyte of Aiken, South Carolina, published her book Swearingen/Vanswearingen and Related Families, KL Whyte, Aiken, in 1997 which clearly shows the wrongness perpetrated by Eckert on that group of relatives.

Gaylord Carlyle Hinshaw, wrote DEFENDING BLUE JACKET from the depredations of the white men; A Shawnee Indian defense of heritage in the Library of Congress, Local Legacies Project, BLUE JACKET OUTDOOR DRAMA, a Xenia, Ohio Local Legacy;  A report to the Library of Congress dated July 22, 2000.  This summer playhouse presentation is based on Eckert’s work and, like Eckert, consistently insists that the play is true history.  This report documents the numerous false items presented to the public most nights at Xenia.  The Library of Congress file on that Legacy of the Project now has more documentation of the inaccuracies in the play than material supporting the producers (First Frontier, Inc.) contention that the play portrays true history of northwestern Ohio!  And, if you haven’t yet guessed it, those truth knowing, letter writing dissenters were all Blue Jacket, Shawnee Indians.

August last, John Sugden’s book, Blue Jacket, Warrior of the Shawnees, University of Nebraska Press, Lincoln, came off the presses and quickly proved to be the defining history of Blue Jacket, his sons and grandsons.  Mr. Sugden completely debunked those authors that would have Blue Jacket being a white man rather than a Shawnee Indian.

During the year 2000, Dr. Dan Krane of Wright State University in Dayton, Ohio, conducted a study of the DNA of Swearingen and Blue Jacket males to compare the two families biological history.  Tracing these males to their corresponding ancestors is un-contested.  All samples of the half-dozen of each family’s male donors were freely donated for this purpose.  It was found that there is no biological relationship between the two families. 

In February of this year, Randolph Noe’s book, The Shawnee Indian Tribe, An Annotated Bibliography, Scarecrow Press, Lanham was published.  This book contains 2779 references on the Shawnees or about 80 percent of all known writings about this tribe.  Blue Jacket and his progeny comprise a significant part of this compendium and none of Eckert’s work is in here because Mr. Noe declined to include such works of fiction.
 
Marmaduke Swearingen, the exact white man in Eckert’s books, was born on January 2, 1763.  The date is proven by a Swearingen Bible, in which his  birth was entered.  The book is now owned by Thomas G. Swearingen, of Uniondale, Indiana.

Blue Jacket was born in the early 1740’s, a rather un-studious statement but is based on very good research by the above cited authors and other historians.  His wife, Baby, a métis half-French, half-Shawnee Indian daughter of Jacques Dupéron Baby of the French Canadian traders in the Detroit River area, gave birth to her first son by Blue Jacket in 1767, four years after Marmaduke Swearingen was born.

I suggest the board members of the JESSE STUART FOUNDATION review the arrangement made with Allan W. Eckert to make certain that marketing of his book, THE FRONTIERSMEN, includes clear advertisements that the portrayal of Blue Jacket is not historical fact but a concoction of Eckert’s making.

The assumption is here made that your organization is one of non-profit, proliferating integrity in the literary world.  Eckert’s four books with Blue Jacket as one of the central figures, are well known by the industry as a blatant use of fabrication of history in order to elicit profit from the un-suspecting reading public.  The FOUNDATION should be  careful not to earn the reputation of foisting fiction on readers, ballyhooing the fiction as  accurate history.

Another point I want to make is this:  The Norman, Oklahoma Public Library, shelves Eckert’s book, Blue Jacket, War Chief of the Shawnees, in the children’s section.  Eckert depicts that book as true history and young reading minds believe what he says.  The book has not a single reference documenting what Eckert wrote about Blue Jacket being a white man ratner than a Shawnee Indian.  In fact, in all the remaining books under discussion, not one documents the Marmaduke white man tale or the one having Marmaduke killing his brother on November 4, 1791.

I challenge you to take this matter seriously and reply to me as to your intended action.  The items discussed by me are not allegations but are well known and documented by historians of note. 

Yours very truly;


Gaylord Carlyle Hinshaw,
Seventh Generation Descendent of Waweypiesenwa,
Researcher of the Shawnee Tribe,
Genealogist of the Blue Jacket Family and
Consulting Geologist.
1713 Baron Drive
Norman OK 73071
405-364-4584
bjexploration@swbell.net

Enc: Author addresses
Cc:  Blue Jacket family
       Cited authors
       Library of Congress
       Swearingen family

Addresses of Cited Authors

Dr. Dan E. Krane
Associate Professor, Biological Sciences
128 Biological Sciences Bldg.
Wright State University
3640 Colonel Glenn Highway
Dayton OH 45435-0001
(937) 775-2257
dan.krane@wright.edu

Randolph Noe
1400 One Riverside Plaza
Louisville KY 40202
(502) 584-6137
randynoe@tilfordlaw.com

John Sugden
13 Englemere Close
Arnside
Cumbria, LA 50AP
England
Johnsugden@hotmail.com

Helen Hornbeck Tanner
Senior Research Fellow
The Newberry Library
60 West Walton Street
Chicago IL 60610
(312) 255-3537
hhtanner@aol.com

Robert V. Van Trees
589 Westwood Drive
Fairborn OH 45234
vntrz@graphtronics.net

Karel L. Whyte
224 Heathwood Dr
Aiken SC 29808
(803) 649-7189
kjwhyte@earthlink.net    

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