Buckongahelas (c. 1720 – May 1805) together with Little Turtle and Blue Jacket, achieved the greatest victory won by Native Americans, killing 600.
The chief led his Lenape band from present-day Delaware westward, eventually to the White River area, founding Muncie, Indiana.
[4] During the war years, a number of Lenape who had converted to Christianity were living in frontier villages run by Moravian missionaries.
In April 1781, at the Ohio village of Gnadenhütten, Buckongahelas warned the Lenape that an American militia from Pennsylvania was likely to execute any Indians in their path and would not pay attention to their Christian pacifism.
John Heckewelder, a Moravian missionary, wrote in his account that Buckongahelas' oration to the Christian Indians was told "with ease and an eloquence not to be imitated."
He continued, "Eleven months after this speech was delivered by this prophetic chief, ninety-six of these same Christian Indians, about sixty of them women and children, were murdered at the place where these very words had been spoken, by the same men he had alluded to, and in the same manner that he had described.
In the Treaty of Paris (1783) that ended the Revolutionary War, the British ceded Indian lands in the Ohio Country that were not theirs to the United States.
In the late 1780s, Buckongahelas joined a Shawnee-led confederacy to try to repel the American settlers who had begun migrating west of the Appalachian Mountains, using the Ohio River to penetrate the territory.
Buckongahelas led his warriors to win the most devastating military victory ever achieved by Native Americans in the United States, in 1791 against General Arthur St. Clair, who lost 600 troops.
Many local Native Americans thought the epidemics of fatal illnesses to be related to witchcraft, as their traditional remedies and medicine men had no effect on the course of the diseases.