Bemino  Bemino ("fl." 1710s–1780s)—known as John Killbuck Sr. to white settlers—was a renowned medicine man and war leader of Shawnee and Delaware (Lenape) warriors during the French and Indian War (1754–63). He was a son of Netawatwees, at one time principal chief of the Delaware, and his own son was Gelelemend (John Killbuck Jr.), a Delaware chief during the American Revolutionary War. Bemino lived with his people in what is now eastern Ohio, but was mostly active in the upper Potomac River watershed in what is now the Eastern Panhandle of West Virginia. Within the Delaware hierarchy, Bemino’s phratry (clan) is unclear, but he was a member of either the Turtle or the Turkey phratry. He may have been born or raised in what is now eastern Ohio where his father, a Delaware sub-chief named Netawatwees, had been forced to remove from the Delaware River Valley by white pressure. In any case, by the 1740s and '50s Bemino was well acquainted with all the white settler families in the valley of the South Branch Potomac River in what is now the Eastern Panhandle of West Virginia. This river and region were known at that time to Indians and whites alike by a Native American name — Wappocomo. Such was the rapport between Bemino and the newly established whites that, shortly before the outbreak of the French and Indian War (1754), one of them—a Mr Peter Casey—hired Bemino to chase down and retrieve a "runaway negro" (or, by another account, a runaway "Irish servant"). In trying to collect his payment, however, he quarreled with Casey, who knocked him to the ground with a cane. (Bemino long held a grudge and, throughout the subsequent hostilities, attempted without success to find an opportunity to kill Casey.) At times, Bemino would live among some of the English families, a situation that allowed him to familiarize himself with their habits and assess their resources—knowledge that later proved invaluable when he allied himself with the French as a leader of marauding warrior bands in the region. After the outbreak of hostilities at the Battle of Jumonville Glen in Pennsylvania (May 28, 1754), Bemino was among those Indian leaders siding with the French against the English.