Mingo Puckshunubbe

By Craig Thompson Friend

Mingo Puckshunubbe, a Choctaw chief around eighty years old, was part of a delegation to Washington, D.C. The delegation arrived in Maysville October 13, 1824, and had supper at Captain Langhorne’s Inn, a popular spot at the time. The chief wanted to see the river and fell off the abutment of the road, a distance of twenty feet. He died two days later and the city gave “every attention that could possibly be paid to a fellow mortal,” according to the newspaper accounts. He was interred in the old pioneer graveyard with full military honors.

Residents of Maysville, Kentucky, gathered to memorialize Puckshunubbe, a Mingo chief who had resisted settlement in the Ohio Valley between the 1760s and 1780s. The ceremony and funeral were, as a historian of the 1930s depicted, “military to the nth degree, . . . [and] the largest concourse ever assembled in the little Kentucky town. They came from all parts of Kentucky those who had warred against him, to pay a just tribute to his great military powers. Then, in a moment of exasperation, the historian concluded, “Pioneers!” Nearly three decades of war against the Mingos, Shawnees, and other northern Indians in the late eighteenth century had brought terror into the homes of Kentucky’s early white settlers, but here in the streets of Maysville were their children and grandchildren celebrating the enemy and praising his military acumen.