Buckongahelas (1725?–May 1805) was a Delaware (Lenape) war leader who led his followers against the United States during the American Revolutionary War and again in the "Indian war" of the 1790s, in which he helped to inflict the severest loss ever suffered by the United States against Native Americans. Buckongahelas's name was spelled in numerous ways by contemporary chroniclers, including Pukangehela and Pachgantschihilas, and was translated as "Giver of Presents" or "One whose movements are certain." An American Indian agent who knew Buckongahelas characterized him as the George Washington of the Delaware people.

Early in the American Revolutionary War, Buckongahelas broke away from the neutral or pro-American Delawares led by White Eyes, and established a town near the Shawnee war leader Blue Jacket. The two men became close allies.

During the war, a number of Delawares who had converted to Christianity lived in dangerously exposed frontier villages run by Moravian missionaries. On 7 May 1781, Buckongahelas advised the Christian Indians at the town of Gnadenhütten to remove further west before the Americans came to kill them. The Christian Indians declined to move, but Buckongahelas's warning was tragically prophetic: nearly 100 Indians (mostly women and children) were executed by American militiamen at the Gnadenhutten massacre on 8 March 1782.

The United States compelled a number of Indian leaders to sign treaties after the Revolutionary War, claiming the Ohio Country by right of conquest. Buckongahelas declined to sign these treaties, and in the late 1780s he joined a Shawnee-led confederacy that won several battles against the Americans, before ultimately being defeated at the Battle of Fallen Timbers in 1794. When the British failed to support the Indian confederacy after Fallen Timbers, Buckongahelas signed the Treaty of Greenville in 1795.

Buckongahelas spent his final years living with his people on the White River near present-day Muncie, Indiana. His death from smallpox or influenza in May of 1805 was believed by many local Indians to have been the work of witchcraft; a witchhunt followed, leading to the execution of several suspected Delaware witches, and the rise to prominence of the Shawnee prophet and witchhunter Tenskwatawa.

See also

• Frontier warfare during the American Revolution

References

• Sugden, John. Blue Jacket: Warrior of the Shawnees. University of Nebraska Press, 2000.

• -----. "Buckongahelas" in American National Biography. Oxford University Press, 1999.

• Weslager, C. A. The Delaware Indians. New Brunswick, New Jersey, 1972.

• White, Richard. The Middle Ground: Indians, Empires, and Republics in the Great Lakes Region, 1650-1815. New York, 1991.