Blue Jacket
Historian Allan Eckert published several historical novels of the Ohio River Valley and the personages made famous there, including Simon Kenton, Tecumseh, Cornplanter, Blue Jacket, Little Turtle, Pontiac, and many more. Heavily footnoted and with copious informational notes for each chapter provided, many have long regarded these books (and later films and stageplays) as definitive sources for the history of the region over a period of decades.
In these works and in a long-running summer outdoor drama, the Shawnee war chief Blue Jacket occupies a pivotal role. Blue Jacket was a leader of a confederation of the Northwestern Tribes which preceded that of Tecumseh, and a leading figure of the Northwest Indian War. Eckert presented Blue Jacket as an Englishman named Van Swearingen, captured, adopted, and raised by the Shawnee before the Revolutionary War, growing up to be a formidable war leader and fighter.
Blue Jacket was a formidable war chief, but the theory that he was a captured white settler of any nation is a stretch. There is historical documentation for Van Swearingen, but he was many years younger than the historical Blue Jacket when he appeared on the scene. There is also a distinct absence of contemporaneous historical data which makes reference to Blue Jacket being of English descent. No English documents refer to him as a renegade or a half-breed, which they certainly would have given the charged racial attitudes of the day were it known.
The support for the theory remained until the early 2000s, when DNA testing seemingly disproved it forever, despite many continuing references to the Shawnee warrior and chieftain on websites and library shelves as a white man.
There were many captives who were raised by and fought for their captors, from the earliest days of the colonial settlements until the end of the Indian Wars in North America. But there is little likelihood that Blue Jacket was one of them.