Blackfish (c. 1729–1779), known in his native tongue as Cot-ta-wa-ma-go or Mkah-day-way-may-qua, was a Native American leader, war chief of the Chillicothe division of the Shawnee tribe. Little is known about him, since he only appears in written historical records during the last three years of his life, primarily because of his interactions with the famous American frontiersmen Daniel Boone and Simon Kenton.
When the Shawnees were defeated by V...
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Blackfish (c. 1729–1779), known in his native tongue as Cot-ta-wa-ma-go or Mkah-day-way-may-qua, was a Native American leader, war chief of the Chillicothe division of the Shawnee tribe. Little is known about him, since he only appears in written historical records during the last three years of his life, primarily because of his interactions with the famous American frontiersmen Daniel Boone and Simon Kenton.
When the Shawnees were defeated by Virginia in Dunmore's War in 1774, the resulting peace treaty made the Ohio River the boundary between western Virginia (what is now Kentucky and West Virginia) and American Indian lands in the Ohio Country. Although this treaty was agreed to by Shawnee leaders such as Cornstalk, Blackfish and a number of other leaders refused to acknowledge the loss of their traditional hunting grounds in Kentucky.
Violence along the border escalated with the outbreak of the American Revolutionary War in 1775. As a result, the Chillicothe Shawnees moved their...
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