50 Fun Facts About Shawnee

Which Civil War general was given the middle name Tecumseh by a father who admired the Shawnee leader?

William Sherman answered to Cump among friends and family all his life. His father chose the name a few years after the Shawnee leader fell in battle.

Which frontiersman was captured by the Shawnee in 1778, adopted into a Shawnee family and renamed Big Turtle?

Daniel Boone lived for months as Sheltowee before he escaped. One biographer calls his flight home one of the great legends of frontier history.

Wapakoneta, Ohio, a Shawnee town until the tribe's removal in the 1830s, was later the hometown of which astronaut?

Neil Armstrong grew up in Wapakoneta, where a museum now honors the first man on the Moon. The town's Shawnee name may mean the place of white bones.

George Drouillard, the son of a Shawnee mother, was a hunter and interpreter on whose famous expedition?

Lewis and Clark's party relied on Drouillard's sign language to talk with nations they met, and Lewis rated him the most skilled hunter of all the men.

The name of Tecumseh, the Shawnee leader born into the Panther clan around 1768, is often translated as what?

Shooting Star refers to a meteor linked with his clan. Later stories said one crossed the sky at his birth, though his father and most of his siblings were named for the same meteor.

Challenged in 1806 to prove his powers, the Shawnee Prophet stunned his doubters by correctly predicting what?

A solar eclipse darkened the sky on June 16, 1806, as he had promised. A territorial governor had urged neighboring tribes to demand that he make the sun stand still.

The legend of Tecumseh's Curse says US presidents die in office if elected in a year ending in which digit?

Zero is the fateful digit: every president elected in such a year from 1840 to 1960 died in office. Ronald Reagan, elected in 1980, was shot in 1981 and survived.

In which US service academy town do students toss pennies for luck at a bronze figure nicknamed Tecumseh?

Annapolis midshipmen at the Naval Academy also call it the God of 2.0, after the minimum passing grade. The figurehead was in fact carved to show another chief, Tamanend.

Which state, where the Shawnee were resettled in the 1800s, is home to all three federally recognized Shawnee tribes?

Oklahoma holds the Absentee Shawnee, the Eastern Shawnee and the Shawnee Tribe. The three nations took separate roads west and still govern themselves apart.

Which Atlantic-bound river is thought to take its name from a band of Shawnee who settled along it in the 1600s?

Savannah was the name Carolina colonists gave those Shawnee, the Savannah Indians. Allied with the colonists, they destroyed a rival nation, the Westo, in 1680.

Which Shawnee holy man, a younger brother of Tecumseh, took a name meaning Open Door after his visions in 1805?

Tenskwatawa had been a hapless youth called Lalawethika, the Noise Maker. He was born one of triplets, and he blinded his own right eye with an arrow when young.

Which future US president, then governor of Indiana Territory, led the army that burned Prophetstown in 1811?

William Harrison rode his fame from that campaign to the White House in 1840. He died only a month after taking office.

Tecumseh was killed in October 1813 at which battle, fought after a British retreat into present-day Ontario?

The Thames defeat broke his confederacy for good. Rival stories grew up about who buried him and where, and the location of his remains is still unknown.

Which American city did Tecumseh and British general Isaac Brock capture in August 1812 by bluffing its commander?

Detroit fell without a battle when General William Hull surrendered the town and an army that actually outnumbered the force threatening it.

At which 1794 battle near present-day Toledo, Ohio, did General Anthony Wayne defeat a Shawnee-led confederacy?

Fallen Timbers was fought among trees that a tornado had toppled beside the Maumee River. The confederacy's British allies shut their nearby fort's gates on the retreating warriors.

After their 1794 defeat, Shawnee leaders signed the 1795 Treaty of what, ceding large parts of present-day Ohio?

Greenville's terms traded those lands for goods worth $20,000, such as blankets, utensils and farm animals. A young Tecumseh did not sign.

Which Shawnee chief led the 1774 attack at Point Pleasant, then died a prisoner at an American fort in 1777?

Cornstalk had gone to Fort Randolph on a diplomatic visit. Soldiers killed him to avenge a militiaman's death, costing the Shawnee a leading voice of moderation.

Which royal governor of Virginia gave his name to the 1774 war that pushed the Shawnee north of the Ohio River?

Lord Dunmore sent two armies into the Ohio Country. The peace that followed cost the Shawnee their hunting grounds in what are now Kentucky and West Virginia.

Which Shawnee war chief was long said to be a white captive named Marmaduke Van Swearingen, a tale DNA tests undercut?

Blue Jacket was already an established chief when Van Swearingen was supposedly captured, historians found. The story first appeared in 1877, decades after his death.

Which Ohio Shawnee chief kept most of his people out of Tecumseh's War and never signed a removal treaty?

Black Hoof was known as a fierce warrior who later decided his people had to adapt to survive. He led them in Ohio until his death in 1831.

Which general's army was shattered in 1791 by a Shawnee and Miami alliance in the Ohio Country?

Arthur St. Clair lost so many men that the casualty rate remains the highest ever suffered by a US Army unit. George Washington forced him to resign his command.

During the Beaver Wars of the 1600s, which confederacy drove the Shawnee from their Ohio Valley homeland?

Iroquois war parties wanted the valley as a hunting ground for the fur trade. The Shawnee scattered into widely separated regions and only regrouped in Ohio after 1725.

Which Mid-Atlantic people did the Shawnee honor with the title of grandfathers?

Lenape, also known as the Delaware, were regarded as an ancestral people. In the 1700s the two nations became close neighbors in the Ohio Country, alongside the Mingo.

The Shawnee language, once a trade language among many tribes, belongs to which large Native American family?

Algonquian is the family. Shawnee is written in the Latin alphabet and has its own dictionary, and portions of the Bible have been translated into it.

The name Shawnee is usually linked to a word in related languages for which compass direction?

South is the usual reading, and the people's name is often translated as southerners. Related nations around the Great Lakes saw the Shawnee as their southernmost branch.

Which Shawnee ceremony, held at spring planting and again in autumn, is prepared by women who set its date?

Bread Dance takes its name from the bread the women make for it. The spring gathering comes at planting time and the autumn one is the last of the yearly cycle.

Which of the six Shawnee name groups, each named for an animal, stands for gentleness and peacefulness?

Rabbit is the gentle one. The other five groups represent birds, water life, meat-eaters, grazing animals and animals with tearing paws.

Which Ohio city, the state's first capital, takes its name from one of the five Shawnee divisions?

Chillicothe is usually translated as principal town, and the name moved whenever that division's chief village did. Several places in Ohio have carried it.

The Shawnee Indian Mission, a school that briefly served as a territorial capital in the 1850s, stands in which state?

Kansas keeps the memory alive in the postal name Shawnee Mission, still used for a cluster of Kansas City suburbs. The school is now a museum and a National Historic Landmark.

Which 1811 battle in Indiana, fought while Tecumseh was away recruiting allies, ended with Prophetstown in ashes?

Tippecanoe became the winning general's nickname, and it carried him through a presidential campaign three decades later.

Before Congress recognized it separately, the Shawnee Tribe spent more than a century as part of which larger nation?

Cherokee citizenship came through an 1869 agreement covering 722 Shawnee. Their descendants were known as the Cherokee Shawnee for more than a century.

The Absentee Shawnee take their name from ancestors who, in the mid-1800s, were absent from what?

Their reservation had been set aside farther north, but these bands were living along the Canadian River. An 1854 treaty's promise of allotments failed to lure them back.

Which republic's president, Mirabeau Lamar, paid the Shawnee for their crops before forcing them to leave?

Texas compensated the Shawnee because they had stayed neutral in a war it fought with a neighboring tribe in 1839. It expelled them all the same.

In the 1730s, Shawnee leader Peter Chartier clashed with colonial traders by trying to stop the sale of what?

Rum was what unlicensed traders bartered for pelts, and Shawnee chiefs asked the governor for orders to smash the casks. Chartier later led about 400 Shawnee out of the colony.

Shawnee chief Opessa signed a 1701 treaty of friendship with which English founder of an American colony?

William Penn agreed articles that set out lands and conditions for the tribes and English settlers to live side by side. Opessa's band had asked to settle in his colony three years earlier.

Which Creek faction took up Tecumseh's call to fight the United States, leading to the Creek War of 1813?

Red Sticks were named for their red-painted war clubs. They came mostly from the Upper Towns, which held to traditional leadership and communal land.

Which Kentucky colonel's reputation as the man who killed Tecumseh helped make him US vice president in 1837?

Richard Johnson led the mounted charge in which Tecumseh fell, and his supporters campaigned on the claim. One historian judged his case the strongest, though not conclusive.

Shawnee National Forest and Old Shawneetown, once a Shawnee village, are both found in which state?

Illinois has both. The forest spreads across the Shawnee Hills and is the largest publicly owned body of land in the state.

Which Mississippi River town names the 1811 earthquakes that Tecumseh's allies took as a sign to support him?

New Madrid gave its name to quakes that shook much of the Midwest. Many Muscogee decided the Shawnee cause deserved support and that Tecumseh had foretold the shaking.

The Ohio Shawnee were pressed to move west after which president signed the Indian Removal Act of 1830?

Andrew Jackson signed it in May 1830. By August 1831 the last Ohio Shawnee bands had ceded their lands there.

Many scholars link the Shawnee to which Ohio Valley farming culture that arose around the year 1000?

Fort Ancient villages lined both sides of the Ohio River. Shawnee oral history, art and mythology echo theirs, though a gap in the record leaves the link unproven.

The Shawnee language is closely related to Sauk-Fox and to the language of which other Midwestern people?

Kickapoo is a close sister tongue. Attempts to agree on a single spelling system for Shawnee have so far been unsuccessful.

Which Shawnee woman chief, nicknamed the Grenadier for her height, helped compile a dictionary of Shawnee words?

Nonhelema stood nearly six feet six. She backed the Americans in the Revolution and once disguised two men as Natives so they could carry a warning 160 miles to a threatened fort.

The Union ironclad USS Tecumseh, named for the Shawnee leader, was sunk by a mine in which 1864 battle?

Mobile Bay had a channel sown with mines, then called torpedoes. Her captain steered through them to cut off a Confederate ironclad.

Yvonne Chouteau, a Shawnee Tribe member, joined a famous touring company at 14 and became a star of which art form?

Ballet made her one of the Five Moons, five celebrated Native ballerinas from one state. She was the youngest dancer ever accepted by the Ballet Russe de Monte-Carlo.

Which president signed the Shawnee Tribe Status Act, restoring its separate recognition, as one of his final acts?

Bill Clinton signed it in December 2000, weeks before leaving office. The tribe had been working to regain its own status since the 1980s.

In the early 1800s, which religious group was welcomed to live among the Ohio Shawnee and teach farming techniques?

Quakers came at the invitation of a chief who had decided that his people needed to adapt culturally if they were to avoid being destroyed by warfare.

After summers spent farming beside their bark-covered houses, what did most Shawnee villagers do each winter?

They moved to hunting camps, each family on its own. Hunting was the main occupation of Shawnee men, while the women raised the corn.

French traders once called which tributary of the Ohio the River of the Shawnee, for the people living along it?

Cumberland is the name a Virginia explorer gave it, yet it was still known as the Shawnee River for years afterward. The Shawnee themselves called it Wasioto.

A Shawnee settlement the French called Le Grand Village Sauvage stood along Apple Creek in which future state?

Missouri's Shawnee were uprooted again in 1825, four years after statehood, when about 1,400 of them were sent farther west.