Black Beaver

Black Beaver or Se-ket-tu-may-qua (c. 1806–1880, Lenape, or Delaware) was a trapper and interpreter who worked for the American Fur Company. He served as a scout and guide as he was fluent in English, as well as several European and Native American languages. He is credited with establishing the California and Chisholm trails.

After working as a scout, he settled among his people in the village of Beaverstown in Indian Territory, where they had been relocated in the 1830s.

At the beginning of the American Civil War, he guided hundreds of Union troops and their long wagon train from Fort Arbuckle in Indian Territory to Kansas, to escape much larger Confederate forces. They had to travel more than 500 miles through Indian Territory to reach safety. None of the party or their animals or wagons was lost. Confederates destroyed Black Beaver's ranch, but after the war, he eventually resettled in Indian Territory. He became a wealthy rancher in present-day Anadarko, Oklahoma. His former ranch site has been listed on the National Register of Historic Places.

Black Beaver was born in 1806 into a Lenape family living in the area of present-day Belleville, western Illinois. This was east of St. Louis on the east bank of the Mississippi River. Many Lenape had migrated here after the American Revolutionary War from their traditional territory along the Delaware River and coastal areas of the mid-Atlantic states. As a youth, Black Beaver began trapping and trading beaver pelts for the American Fur Company of John Jacob Astor, as the fur trade was still an important industry.

Known to his own people as Se-ket-tu-may-qua, the young man became fluent in English, French, and Spanish, in addition to his native Lenape and about eight other American Indian languages. He used the common trade sign language to communicate with tribes whose language he did not know. His skills were invaluable to the many white settlers and military expeditions that were traveling west. He served the Dodge-Leavenworth Expedition of 1834 and, during the Mexican–American War (1846–1848), led a unit of Indian volunteers as a captain in the U.S. Army.

When Captain Randolph B. Marcy escorted the first 500 emigrants from Fort Smith, Arkansas to Santa Fe during the gold rush days of 1849, he engaged Black Beaver as his guide. On his return, Black Beaver took a shortcut across the prairie that reduced the two-month trip to two weeks. Thousands of emigrants followed this route to the west; it became known as the California Trail.

After that Black Beaver settled near Fort Arbuckle, in south-central Indian Territory. He became chief of a Lenape village called Beaverstown. During 1849, 1852 and 1854, Black Beaver guided Randolph B. Marcy's exploration expeditions throughout Texas.

In his 1859 guide book The Prairie Traveler, Marcy wrote that Black Beaver