[2] 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.

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.

[3] 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.

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.

[4] In his 1859 guide book The Prairie Traveler, Marcy wrote that Black Beaver had visited nearly every point of interest within the limits of our unsettled territory.

He had set his traps and spread his blanket upon the head waters of the Missouri and Columbia; and his wanderings had led him south to the Colorado and Gila, and thence to the shores of the Pacific in Southern California.

In May 1861, with the outbreak of the American Civil War, General William H. Emory, stationed at Fort Arbuckle, learned that 6,000 Confederate troops were advancing toward his forces from Texas and Arkansas.

He gathered the soldiers from forts Washita, Cobb and Arbuckle near Minco, but to escape to Kansas across the open prairie he needed a guide.

[citation needed] The Confederate Army and allied Native American warriors destroyed Black Beaver’s ranch and placed a bounty on his head.

[citation needed] Black Beaver was the first inductee in the American Indian Hall of Fame, located in Anadarko on part of his former ranch lands.

A fictionalized depiction of Black Beaver appears in the 2021 edition of the educational game The Oregon Trail, where he is shown at various stages of his life, offering advice and history lessons to the player.