Black Beaver

Trapper and guide

Black Beaver was born around 1806 into a Lenape family living near present-day Belleville, western Illinois, east of St. Louis on the Mississippi River's east bank. Many Lenape had moved there after the American Revolutionary War from their ancestral lands along the Delaware River and mid-Atlantic coast. As a young man, he started trapping beaver pelts and trading them for John Jacob Astor's American Fur Company, when the fur trade was still a major industry.

Interpreter and scout

Known to his people as Se-ket-tu-may-qua, Black Beaver learned English, French, and Spanish on top of his native Lenape and roughly eight other American Indian languages. He used trade sign language to talk with tribes whose languages he didn't know. His skills proved invaluable to white settlers and military expeditions heading west. He served on the Dodge-Leavenworth Expedition of 1834 and, during the Mexican–American War (1846–1848), led a unit of Indian volunteers as a U.S. Army captain.

In 1849, Captain Randolph B. Marcy hired him to guide the first 500 emigrants from Fort Smith, Arkansas to Santa Fe. On the return trip, Black Beaver took a shortcut across the prairie that cut a two-month journey down to two weeks. Thousands of emigrants followed that route, which became the California Trail. Afterward, he settled near Fort Arbuckle in south-central Indian Territory and became chief of a Lenape village called Beaverstown.

He guided Marcy's exploration expeditions through Texas in 1849, 1852, and 1854. In his 1859 guidebook The Prairie Traveler, Marcy wrote that Black Beaver had visited nearly every point of interest in the unsettled territory, setting traps on the headwaters of the Missouri and Columbia, and wandering south to the Colorado and Gila rivers and to the Pacific in Southern California. Marcy called him perfectly reliable, brave, and competent, a fearless warrior who never boasted.

By 1860, Black Beaver was the wealthiest and most famous Lenape in America, living in present-day Caddo County, Oklahoma at Anadarko.

Death and legacy

Black Beaver died at his home on May 8, 1880, and was buried on his ranch. In 1976, his remains were moved to a military cemetery at Fort Sill to recognize his Union service during the Civil War. His former ranch site is listed on the National Register of Historic Places. He was a Baptist from 1876 until his death.

Black Beaver was the first inductee into the American Indian Hall of Fame, located in Anadarko on part of his former ranch lands. A character named Se-ket-tu-may-qua appears in Mary Kathryn Nagle's play Manahatta, and his image was used in the Yale Repertory Theater production's set. A fictionalized version of Black Beaver appears in the 2021 edition of the educational game The Oregon Trail, where he offers advice and history lessons.

Did You Know?

• Black Beaver guided more than 800 Union soldiers, 200 teamsters, 80 wagons, and 600 horses and mules across 500 miles of open prairie without losing a single man, horse, or wagon.
• Confederates destroyed his ranch and placed a bounty on his head after he helped Union forces escape.