Red Jacket
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Red Jacket was a Seneca orator and chief of the Wolf clan, based in Western New York. On behalf of his nation, he negotiated with the new United States after the American Revolutionary War, when the Seneca as British allies were forced to cede much land following the defeat of the British; he signed the Treaty of Canandaigua (1794). He helped secure some Seneca territory in New York state, although most of his people had migrated to Canada for resettlement after the Paris Treaty. Red Jacket's speech on "Religion for the White Man and the Red" (1805) has been preserved as an example of his great oratorical style.
Red Jacket from an 1835 lithograph by Henry Corbould, after a painting by Charles Bird King, printed by Charles Joseph Hullmandel, and published in History of the Indian Tribes of North America
President's House, Philadelphia. Red Jacket met with presidents George Washington, and later John Adams, in the presidential mansion in Philadelphia, when that city was the temporary national capital.
Monument at Forest Lawn Cemetery; sculpted by James G. C. Hamilton.
Red Jacket by George Catlin. 1827. Watercolour on paper.
Seneca people
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The Seneca are a group of Indigenous Iroquoian-speaking people who historically lived south of Lake Ontario, one of the five Great Lakes in North America. Their nation was the farthest to the west within the Six Nations or Iroquois League (Haudenosaunee) in New York before the American Revolution. For this reason, they are called “The Keepers of the Western Door.”
Seneca Chief Cornplanter Portrait by F. Bartoli, 1796
Seneca woman Ah-Weh-Eyu (Pretty Flower), 1908.
The Fate of Jane Wells. A non-combatant woman killed during the Cherry Valley Massacre.
Seneca people message stick, inviting tribes to Six Nations dance, received in 1905. Exhibit from the Native American Collection, Peabody Museum, Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts