Our Arklahoma Heritage : "Chequah Watbe" was born at the dawn of the American Revolution and died 120 years later

"Aunt" Jane King Phelps

"Aunt" Jane King Phelps, known by her Ottawa name Chequah Watbee, was born on January,6, 1766 near the Maumee River in Ohio. Her father carried Chippewa and French Canadian ancestry. Her mother came from French Canadian roots.

In those years the Ottawa people still occupied their traditional territories in the Great Lakes region shortly after the end of Pontiac’s War.

She married Kenewabee, who later adopted the name William Phelps. He stood as grand-nephew to Chief Pontiac and served as the eighth Ottawa signer of the Treaty at the Foot of the Rapids of the Maumee of Lake Erie in 1817.

The couple produced a daughter named Sally Wabee Wind. Through Sally the line continued to Chief James Wind as son-in-law, Catherine Wind Jennison as granddaughter, and Chief Guy Jennison as great-grandson. Jane also counted as sister to Lewis King, father of Chief Joseph Badger King, which positioned her as aunt to that leader.I

In her youth Jane absorbed Ottawa plant knowledge and healing practices. She learned to transform herbs and roots into medicines. She trained as midwife and eventually assisted at the births of hundreds of children across the tribe.

She acquired fluency in three languages: French, English, and Algonkian. These skills defined her work from early adulthood onward.Her adult life stretched across 120 years and placed her at the center of every major upheaval that reshaped Ottawa existence.

She observed the American Revolutionary War and its immediate aftermath in Ohio. She saw the War of 1812 unfold and stood present when her husband affixed his mark to the 1817 treaty that followed it.

She endured the forced removal of the Ottawa from Ohio lands to Kansas in 1837. Thirty years later she completed the second removal with her people from Kansas to the new Ottawa reservation in northeast Indian Territory, the area that later formed Ottawa County in Oklahoma.

That final relocation occurred around 1867.

She lived through the entire sequence of federal treaties that progressively reduced Ottawa holdings. She witnessed the Civil War years that triggered the last treaty cessions. She saw the reservation system take root in Indian Territory and the first signs of railroads and settler encroachment that would intensify after her death.

In her final decades she refused coal-oil lamps and kept hand-dipped candles burning beside her bed at night because she distrusted the new light sources and disliked darkness.

As the tribe’s historian she recounted traditional Ottawa stories and customs to each generation that followed. Community gatherings marked her birthdays in her extreme old age. At one such celebration when she had passed 115 years she rose among the dancers and demonstrated the Ottawa steps performed more than a century earlier.

A photograph captured her seated in black dress on her birthday in 1882, when records listed her age as 116. Another image from a few years prior bore a notation of 110 years.

She died in 1886 on the Ottawa reservation east of Miami in what is now Ottawa County, Oklahoma. Contemporary accounts placed her age at 120. Her grave lies in the Ottawa Indian Cemetery.

The stone marker reads “Godmother, Historian & Medicine Woman of the Ottawa Tribe.”

Through her direct descendants and the knowledge she transmitted she anchored multiple lines of Ottawa leadership that extended well into the twentieth century.

Her recorded life supplied one of the longest continuous threads connecting the pre-removal Ohio era to the settled reservation period in Oklahoma.