Black Beaver

Black Beaver, Harbinger of the Chisholm Trail

Posted on November 11, 2014     Leave a Comment

by Paul L Bennett

But for the loyal courage of a 55-year-old Delaware Indian guide, there might never have been a Chisholm Trail. And carrying “maybe’s” just a step further, Oklahoma could have been permanently lost to the union in 1861.

Deep in Confederate territory and surrounded on all sides, Col. William H. Emory abandoned Fort Washita with his 400 Union troops on April 16, 1861. Marching toward Fort Cobb, he captured an advance guard of Texas Confederates, but this was a small consolation for a commander whose near impossible problem still lay ahead and unsolved. Arriving at Fort Cobb, Emery found other troops and civilian refugees that swelled his cavalcade to more than 600. The established routes through the “nations” That led northward to Union territory were straddled by Indian allies of the south.

Here entered Black Beaver (Se-Ket-Tu-Ma-Quah), already known as America’s most reliable Indian guide and western explorer. Seven times he had seen the Pacific. For a decade he had been a trusted employee of the American Fur company in the Pacific Northwest. But by 1853 his days of association with Audubon, Dodge, Marcy and Fremont were behind him. The California Trail over which he had guided Marcy and his first expedition in 1849 now carried thousands of migrants yearly, many of them passed near Black Beavers’s prosperous farm at Fort Arbuckle.

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Captain Black Beaver

Posted on July 3, 2014     2 Comments

by Kerry Holton

Captain Black Beaver with the Lincoln Peace medal.

Captain Black Beaver (Delaware Indian name: Se-ket-Tu-Ma-Quah), is amongst the famous Indians of America’s long and storied frontier history. An illustrious man, he applied himself to a plethora of varied crafts during his lifetime; a reconnoiter, interpreter, trapper, and leader, his birth is generally thought to have occurred sometime during the year of 1806 at an Indian village that is now the present-day city of Belleville, Illinois just outside of St. Louis. He was the son of Chief William Patterson and the Delaware’s were located in two locations at the time, with a majority in Indiana and the rest in Cape Girardeau Missouri. Very little is known about his youth, though he was a seemingly rambunctious child. Throughout his adolescence he spent his time hunting, trapping, and otherwise honing his skills in travel & survival. The first substantiated location of a young Black Beaver is in the mid 1820’s at the Wolf House on the White River in Norfork, MO. This is where the Delaware Nation had settled for a period and where many other tribes, trappers and westward travelers migrated through this location. Noteworthy people who lived here or passed through include Davey Crockett, Sam Houston and his brother John.

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