Buckongahelas ( – May 1805) together with Little Turtle and Blue Jacket, achieved the greatest victory won by Native Americans, killing 600. He was a regionally and nationally renowned Lenape chief, councilor and warrior. He was active from the days of the French and Indian War (Seven Years' War) through the Northwest Indian Wars, after the United States achieved independence and settlers encroached on territory beyond the Appalachian Mountains and Ohio River. The chief led his Lenape band from present-day Delaware westward, eventually to the White River area, founding Muncie, Indiana.
Early life and education
Buckongahelas was born in present-day Delaware around the year 1720 to Lenape parents. The British colonists called the people the Delaware, after the river, which was the heart of their territory. The Algonquian-speaking Lenape lived throughout the mid-Atlantic area. Buckongahelas in the Lenape language means a "Giver of Presents." He was also known as Pachgantschihilas and Petchnanalas, meaning a "fulfiller" or "one who succeeds in all he undertakes."
Marriage and family
Buckongahelas married as a young man and started his family. Under pressure from colonial settlers, he began to move his band westward. He was believed to have lived some time with his people in what is now Buckhannon in Upshur County, West Virginia.
His son Mahonegon was killed there in June 1773 by Captain William White, a native of Frederick County, Virginia.
Local legend suggests Buckongahelas took revenge on White after trailing his son's killer for a period of nine years (1773–1782).
During the war years, a number of Lenape who had converted to Christianity were living in frontier villages run by Moravian missionaries. In April 1781, at the Ohio village of Gnadenhütten, Buckongahelas warned the Lenape that an American militia from Pennsylvania was likely to execute any Indians in their path and would not pay attention to their Christian pacifism. He urged the pacifists to follow him further west away from the encroaching Americans. Moving westward "from the rising sun," the people could live where the land was good and his warriors would protect them. The Christian Lenape did not heed his words.
John Heckewelder, a Moravian missionary, wrote in his account that Buckongahelas' oration to the Christian Indians was told "with ease and an eloquence not to be imitated." He continued, "Eleven months after this speech was delivered by this prophetic chief, ninety-six of these same Christian Indians, about sixty of them women and children, were murdered at the place where these very words had been spoken, by the same men he had alluded to, and in the same manner that he had described." At times, competing tribes tried to control the lands and villages, and it was not clear that the chiefs who signed the treaties had authority over the lands they were ceding.
- Buckhannon River
Legacy and honors
- Chief Buckongahelas' loss of his son Mahonegon was memorialized in a 650-pound bronze statue installed in Buckhannon's Jawbone Run Park, because settlers admired his alliance with British colonists during the Seven Years' War. The statue depicts the chief cradling the body of his son. Ross Straight of Buckhannon, WV created the sculpture.