Dayton -- An epic myth born on the Ohio frontier is unraveling under forensic scrutiny by scientists who contend new genetic research should bury the legend of Chief Blue Jacket's Caucasian origin.
In his day, Blue Jacket was fierce and feared. His warriors whipped more federal troops than Geronimo, Cochise, Crazy Horse and Sitting Bull combined.
Recent studies of DNA samples offer the strongest evidence to date that he also was, in fact, an American Indian, the researchers say.
Since February, their data has made the rounds at scientific conferences. It directly challenges the possibility that Blue Jacket had a white brother -- an Army captain -- and the tale that the chief slew him in battle.
That story was so pervasive that even the Combat Studies Institute of the Army's Command and General Staff College mentioned it in a treatise on the Indian Wars, published in 2000. Tucked into a footnote in an official study guide, it is part of the Pentagon's formal military training program for officers.
The researchers, based at Wright State University in Dayton and at Technical Associates Inc., a DNA lab in Ventura, Calif., say that story is without merit.
Folklore transformed Blue Jacket into a white man who led the Indians' fight to hurl back land-hungry settlers who poured into the Great Lakes region.
Set in North America's wilderness in 1791, the battle of the brothers - one with a saber, the other a tomahawk - has been fodder for history books, novels, movies and scholarly papers.
As the legend goes, a teenager named Marmaduke Swearingen was captured in the 1770s by a Shawnee war party while wearing a blue hunting coat. His younger brother Charles witnessed the capture, but was spared as his 17-year-old idol vanished into the wilderness.
Years later they would meet in combat, on a battlefield where the Wabash River rises in today's Ohio corn belt, and Blue Jacket scalped his sibling.
Using the tools of modern molecular biology, researchers collected Y-chromosome DNA samples from four men who trace their roots to Charles Swearingen and six others descended from the chief.
Their conclusion: DNA from Blue Jacket and Swearingen "argues strongly against the idea that living individuals with those surnames share a common male ancestor in recent history."
Or, more simply: "The Blue Jacket with Caucasian roots legend is not based on reality," said Carolyn D. Rowland, a Wright State University researcher.
Two months ago, the results were shared with the American Association of Forensic Science. This month, the material will be opened to a gathering of Ohio scientists. A scientific paper will be published in September.
The Swearingen genetic material showed up in commonly available databases of Caucasian Y chromosomes, and did track Charles' roots to Dutch immigrants. But the Y-chromosomes simply lacked enough repeating genetic patterns to clinch a common ancestor with Blue Jacket.
Carlyle Hinshaw, an Oklahoma geologist whose great-great-great-great-great-great-great grandfather was Blue Jacket, said many in his family always suspected the chief was an Indian. Hinshaw, 72, helped locate male descendants who gave DNA samples.
But not all his relatives - and there may be 1,000 descendants of the chief around the United States - accept the findings.
"To me, the DNA is infallible, it's absolutely infallible. Others prefer the myth. They know what they've read in the books. What else are you going to believe?" Hinshaw said in a telephone interview from Norman, Okla.
The new evidence could eventually prompt changes in an outdoor drama in Xenia about Blue Jacket that has drawn more than a million people the past 25 years, said Lorrie Sparrow, the show's executive director.
"Personally, I believe that if we need to look at the script, if we need to re-examine it, we have to do it," Sparrow said. "At the time the script was written, it went with the history that was known. Everything was built around the legend of him killing his brother."
On the other hand, the legend makes good drama, Sparrow said. "Do we have to be historically accurate? Or is it our job to present good theater?"
Still unanswered is what happened to Marmaduke, who mysteriously disappeared around 1771. Charles died in 1848 in Indiana, not on a battlefield. A distant cousin, an Army captain out of Winchester, Va., was killed in battle against Blue Jacket.
The soldier's death may explain a bit of the myth, but not how Blue Jacket's racial identity was switched.
One possibility: The Army's defeat was so complete in 1791 that racial attitudes would not stand for Indians accomplishing such a feat. In all, some 623 troops were killed and captured, far more than Custer lost against Sitting Bull years later in Montana.
Mike Pratt, an archaeology professor at Heidelberg College, has excavated the Fallen Timbers battlefield near Toledo, where the Americans finally defeated Blue Jacket. He also has studied old British colonial reports, none of which mention a white man leading the Indians.
"I think all the mythology was generated early in American history. It was the kind of story Americans like to hear, like the boy who runs off with the circus, only this was the boy who runs off to join the Indians and becomes one of their greatest leaders," Pratt said.
DNA work six years ago also suggested the Blue Jacket story could be myth, but the test methods used at the time were not as reliable as today's, said Dan Krane, a molecular biologist at Wright State University who led the research team.
"What we've done now is part of the mainstream, we've been much more thorough and now it's definitive," said Krane, who grew up in Euclid.
But there could be one possible weak spot.
All of the Blue Jacket family DNA came from descendants of the chief's only son, George. If another man impregnated the chief's wife, a woman of French and Shawnee heritage, the work goes out the window.
"I guess that could be the Achilles heel of our analysis," Krane said.
But he said there was no mention that George wasn't the biological child of the chief. . . . "Never is there a whisper of that."
To reach this Plain Dealer reporter:
bsloat@plaind.com, 513-631-4125