Eskippakithiki, The Last Indian Town in Kentucky - The Filson ...

THE FILSON CLUB 

HISTORY QUARTERLY 

Vol. 6 LOUISVILLE, KENTVCZV, OCTOBER, 1932 No. 4 

ESKIPPAKITHIKI: THE LAST INDIAN 

TOWN IN KENTUCKY 

BY LUCIEN BECKNER 

Read before The Filson Club, March 1, 1932 

INTRODUCTION: At the present Indian Old Fields in Clark 

County, from about 1718 to 1754, was the Shawnee town of 

Eskippakithild, the last Indian town in Kentucky. To the 

traders of that day it was known as the Little Pict Town, but its 

Iroquoian name, "Kentucky," outlasted the former two and has 

become very dear to all of us. For the proper understanding of 

the history of this old wilderness commonwealth and its builders, 

we must first make a rapid survey of its aboriginal neighbors and 

their relationships. 

The Indians of North America are divided into about eighty 

linguistic families, of which more than fifty are found north of 

Mexico. Of these only six or seven lived east of the Mississippi 

River: Algonquian, Iroquoian, Siouan, Muskhogean, and two or 

three smaller stocks. Those speaking Algonquian dialects have, 

in historic times, covered areas of the continent from Newfoundland 

and Labrador to the valley of the Saskatchewan, with groups 

thrust southward into Wyoming, Illinois, Indiana , and Ohio, and 

along" the Atlantic coast to the Carolinas. They almost encircled 

the Iroquoian and Siouan peoples who lived in the St. Lawrence, 

Ohio, Hudson, and upper Mississippi valleys, with offshoots into 

Virginia and the southeast. 

The frontiers of this far-flung Algonquian domain marched for 

thousands of miles with the Eskimos in the north; the Athapas-

356 The Filson Club History .Quarterly [ Vol. 6 

cans in the northwest; the Siouans in the west, in the Ohio and 

Great Lakes valleys, and along the Atlantic slopes; the Muskhogeans 

and Yuchians in the south; and the Iroquoians in the valleys 

of the St. Lawrence, Hudson, and Susquehanna rivers, and 

in the Carolina hills. The eastern Algonquian tribes best known 

to us were the Algonkins, Pequots, Narragansetts, Mohicans, 

Delawares, and Powhatans, listed from north to south along the 

seaboard. They had a great effect on our early history, and from 

them has been derived the notion most of us have of the Indian-bloodthirsty, 

and low in culture--a nomad hunter whose squaw 

does the hard work. In the west their best known tribes were the 

Shawnees, Miamis, Ottawas, Illinois, Chippeways, Cheyennes, 

and Crees. These were like their eastern kin in culture. From 

Algonquian tongues have come our words squaw, papoose, wigwam, 

caucus, tomahawk, moose, raccoon, opossum, Massachusetts, 

Connecticut, Illinois, Wisconsin, Michigan, Wyoming, 

Mississippi, Manitoba, Saskatchewan, and many others. 

The best known Iroquoian tribes were those of the Five Nations: 

Mohawks or Iroquois, Cayugas, Oneidas, Onondagas, and 

Seneeas, who were also called, collectively, the Iroquois, the Senecas, 

the Confederacy, and the League, whose homes were in 

New York; the Tuscaroras of North Carolina, who moved north 

in the first half of the eighteenth century and joined the League, 

causing it to be called thereafter the Six Nations; the Conestogas 

of Maryland and Pennsylvania; the Hurons who, driven from the 

north of Lake Erie by the Five Nations, became known to our 

pioneers as Wyandots; and lastly the Cherokees, whose language 

and customs were so unlike the other Iroquoians that they are 

seldom thought of as the same. The Iroquoians have given us the 

words Erie, Huron, Niagara, Quebec, Ontario, Ohio, Tennessee, 

and Kentucky. 

The eastern Siouans are but slightly known to the casual reader. 

Their most noted tribe was the Catawba which, driven out of 

the upper Ohio Valley by the Iroquois, about 1650, sett!ed in the 

Carolinas. The Siouans were sedentary, great corn-growers, more 

civilized than the Indians surrounding them, and were the builders 

of the great earthworks and hill-forts of Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, 

Wisconsin, the Dakotas, Iowa, Missouri, West Virginia, Kentueky, 

Virginia, and Georgia. Their modern descendants, Sioux, 

Omahas, Osages, Dakotas, Mandans, etc., are better known to us.

Vol. 6 ] The Filson Club History Quarterly 357 

Tepee, Paducah, Omaha, Chatteroi, Kanawha, Missouri, Arkansas, 

Kansas, Iowa, Nebraska, and Dakota arc Siouan words. 

Among the Muskhogeans were the Chickasaws, Choctaws, 

Creeks, Seminoles, Natchez, and Yemasees, who lived in the eastern 

Gulf States, in Tennessee, and in western Kentucky. They 

influenced white settlement greatly and were a valiant, cultured, 

and able people. Many northern tribes fled to them for protection 

from the savage Iroquois, who never attacked them successfully. 

They have given us many geographic terms, Appalachian, 

Caloosahatchie, Tuscaloosa, Tombigbee, Natchez, Yazoo, Alabama, 

and Oklahoma being some of them. 

THE SRAWNEES: Of all these ancient peoples, for purposes of 

this story, our greatest interest is in the Shawnees who had, perhaps, 

the most eventful history of any tribe in the United States, 

a section of which, the Picts or Piquas, built the village of Eskippakithiki 

in the southeastern corner of the present Clark County, 

Kentucky. Eskippaki is a Shawnee word meaning "blue-lick," as 

a salt-sulphur spring was called; and (th)iki is a locative ending 

which can be translated "place," the whole meaning "blue-lickplace." 

The word Shawnee means "southerner" in the Algonquian 

tongues; and, historically, it became applied to those Indians who, 

breaking away from the Outagami or Sauk Nation in Wisconsin, 

and moving southward across the Ohio, took the advance of the 

Algonquian invasion in that direction, thereby acquiring their 

new name. This southward movement of the Shawnees was the 

last part of a general movement of the Algonquians that began-according 

to the ralam Olum, the birchbark historic record of the 

Delawares, a closely related Algonquian tribe--shortly before 

Leif Ericsson landed in Vinland. Before that time all of the Algonquians 

seem to have lived north of the Great Lakes. 

When the Shawnees started south is not certainly known. 

However, it was not long before the French came to Illinois, for 

the Jesuit Relations of 1648 shows that some of them were with 

the Mascoutins in Illinois at that time; but before 1669 they had 

fled southward, trying to escape the fierce war parties of the Five 

Nations. The Jesuit Relations of 1670 says that they then lived 

some distance to the southeast of Illinois, which puts them in Kentueky 

or Tennessee.

358 The Filson Club Hislory Quarterly [Vol. 6 

Before the white man reached America, the savage Algonquians, 

who had not yet lost their northern hardiness, had been 

hurling themselves against the Easterners--sedentary Siouans 

and the Iroquoians--until, in their desperation, five tribes of the 

latter, about 1570, formed the confederacy known as the Five 

Nations, the most efficient in eastern North America. Getting 

guns from the Dutch, about 1630-1640, many years before the 

Indians of the interior received them, they turned on their tormentors 

and crushed them. In their raids into the west they 

reached the Shawnees about 1655 and, according to Charlevoix, 

conquered them by 1672. 

By the second half of the seventeenth century many Shawnees 

had made their way up the southern branches of the Ohio, where 

they built their towns of Chaskepe and Meguachaika on a river 

which is called on Franquelin's map of 1684 the "Skipaki cipi ou 

Riviere bleue," which is either the Red or the Licking River. The 

topography and drainage of the Ohio Valley were not understood 

in those long-ago days and the old maps are so badly scrambled 

that it too often is impossible to he certain about locations or the 

modern equivalents of their obsolete names. In 1673, while on 

the Mississippi passing the mouth of the Ohio, Marquette notes 

that the Ohio is "inhabited by a people called Chaouanons 

[French spelling of Shawnees] in such numbers that they reckon 

25 villages in one district and 15 in another, lying quite near to 

each other." 

Considering the date and the sources from which Franquelin 

compiled his map and that the country north of the Ohio had been 

swept almost clean of inhabitants by this time, the settlements 

referred to by Marquette must have been those towns on the Skipaki 

cipi in Kentucky. In the same account we axe given a 

glimpse of the effect of the Iroquois' raids on the southern Indians, 

for he says: "and because these poor people can not defend themselves 

[not having firearms], they allow themselves to be captured 

and taken like flocks of sheep; and, innocent though they are, they 

nevertheless sometimes experience the barbarity of the Iroquois, 

who cruelly burn them." 

That the Shawnees were not nerveless cowards, their whole 

after-history pr0claSms., From 1655 to 1815, for one hundred and 

sixty years, they were always at war; and from 1755 to the end of 

the War of 1812, for sixty years, they were the backbone of the

Vol. 6 ] The Fdson Club History Quarterly 359 

opposition to the white advance, which was a longer time than the 

opposition of any other Indian people except the Iroquois. Having 

no European arms in the seventeenth century, they were compelled 

to flee from the well-armed Iroquois. Some fled to the 

Miamis, north of the Ohio, uniting with them against the common 

enemy and winning for both swift Iroquoian vengeance; 

others fled along the Warriors' Path, through the Cumberland 

Gap, to the Spanish in Florida. LaSalle invited the few left in 

Kentucky to come to Illinois, where he built Fort St. Louis, in 

1681, for their protection. There some of the Shawnees built a 

new Chaskepe, and became children of Louis XIV, King of 

France, and were inoculated with sympathies which governed 

much of the subsequent Shawnee history. Since then, with the 

exception of Eskippakithiki, a few houses opposite Lower Shawnee 

Town at the mouth of the Scioto, and a temporary village or 

two, there have been no Indian residents in Kentucky.* 

THE SHAWNEES IN CAROLINA: The'Warriors' Path or Trace 

crossed the Ohio River at the mouth of Cabin Creek in Mason 

County, Kentucky, below the mouth of the Scioto, where Portsmouth, 

Ohio, now stands. This Trace ran to the Upper Blue 

Licks, in Fleming County; thence to Eskippakithiki, which the 

white settlers later renamed Indian Old Fields, in Clark County; 

thence up Station Camp Creek, in Estill County, to the Pictured 

Caves at its head near the mouth of Red Lick Creek; thence 

through the low hills of Jackson County to the Flat Lick near 

Barbourville, in Knox County; and thence out of Kentucky 

through Cumberland Gap: and along tl e back border of the Carolinas 

to the Spanish settlements in Georgia and Florida. This was 

from prehistoric times a major trade route down which went copper, 

northern furs, and glacial pebbles for making stone axes; and 

up which came sea-shells, southern plumage, and mica. 

Georgia, at the time this story begins, had not been settled by 

the English and was considered a part of Florida, the Spanish having 

settlements on the coast and gold mines in the interior. Upon 

the southern end of this Trace the Shawnees--or Savannahs as 

they were there called--bnilt their towns, on the waters of the Savannah 

River, from whence they robbed the Spanish and traded 

with the South Carolina English for the firearms and edged tools 

which had become so necessary for their existence. Rich in per-

360 The Filson Club History Quarterly [ Vol. 6 

sonality, they impressed their names on the Savannah and Suwanee 

Rivers. 

In 1680 they made their welcome in their new homes secure by 

siding with the South Carolinians in their war against the Yuehi 

Indians. In 1706, however, braves from one of the Savannah 

towns killed several whites, perhaps in North Carolina, which 

government sent a militia force and a band of Catawba Indians 

against the offending town. The result is not known, but many of 

the Shawnees fled about this time to the Delawares, their Algonquian 

kin in Pennsylvania. 

ESKIPPECK ON THE APALACHICOLA: The next year, 1707, 

Lamhatty, a southern Indian who had been taken captive to Virginia, 

made a statement to Beverly, the Virginia historian, about 

the Indians of the South and drew a map to illustrate his story. 

Upon this map he placed a town on the lower Apalachicola River 

that, in the published versions, is printed "Ephippeck," which is 

very unlike other Southern Indian names. It never appears on 

later maps, perhaps because the Apalachicola was raided about 

that time by the Tuscaroras and many of its denizens scattercd. 

The word is evidently a misreading for Eskippeek, in which the 

obsolete long form of s, which looks like a p, was used; it was followed 

by a k, in which the final loop is so open that it has been 

mistaken for an h. This word was used as a town name possibly 

by the same Shawnees who came from the Skipaki eipi in Kentucky 

(eipi means river in Algonquian tongues, as seen in the 

word Mississippi). 

They are probably the Shawnees who, about this time, started 

back to Kentucky to build their new Eskippaki at Indian Old 

Fields. In support of this supposition there are not only the identity 

of names and a conformity in timeliness but also the fact that 

Catahecassa or Black Hoof (for years head chief of the Shawnccs 

until Teeumseh rebelled against him in his old age, and who had 

been a resident of Eskippakithiki), told Colonel .lohn Johnston, 

the Federal Indian agent amongst the Ohio and Indiana tribes 

from 1812 to 1842, that his people came from the South where 

they had lived not far from the sea. The upper waters of the Savannah, 

where most of the southern Shawnecs lived, were some 

distance from the sea, and its lower waters Were settled by whites; 

but on the lower waters of the Apalachicola, Eskippeck was closer 

to the Gulf and had no white neighbors.


Ramsey in his Annals of Tennessee gives us an incident in the 

northward trek of what must have been the Shawnees Who settled 

in Kentucky, because they are too far west to have been those 

who went to Permsylva a. He says: "M. Charlcville, a French 

trader from Crozat's colony at New Orleans, came in 1714 among 

the Shawnees, then inhabiting the country on the Cumberland 

river; and traded with them. His store was built on a mound, 

near the present site of Nashville." Here, he says, the Shawnees 

had "forted themselves, and maintained a protracted war for the 

possession (if their country." However, the Chickasaws and 

Cherokees, not liking such squatters in their richest hunting country, 

soon drove them out. Pcnicaut, the French missionary, in 

his Relation for 1714 says, that he "found, among the Natchez, 

some slaves belonging to the nation of the Chaouanons who had 

been captured by a strong party of Chickasaws, Yazous, and 

Natchez, who, under the pretext of visiting their village for the 

purpose of dancing the calumet of peace, had attacked them in the 

most base and treacherous manner, and killed their grand chief, 

dth most of his family, took eleven prisoners, among whom was 

the wife of the chief, and brought them to Natchez."8 There 

seems to have been no game laws protecting the poor, wandering, 

home-hunting Shawnees. 

The only places open to these fleeing Eskippeckians were the 

French settlements in Illinois, the deserted Kentucky country, 

the Creek towns in Georgia and Alabama, and the Delaware country 

in Pennsylvania. Had they gone to Illinois the French records 

would have shown it. To go south to the Creeks would be to go 

back into that from which they were fleeing. East and west were 

closed to them by the vigilant Cherokees and Chickasaws. To go 

north of the Ohio and east of the French influence would put them 

in the country also claimed by the dread and jealous Iroquois, 

their ancient enemies. The route to the Delawares led through 

hostile Cherokee or Iroquois territory, and therefore for the time 

impassible. Their most probable route was down the Cumberland 

to the Ohio, thence up it to a settlement in central Kentucky--to 

the land where many of them had been born, but which 

had been vacant ever since their flight from it thirty or forty 

years before. 

They must have stopped for a year or so at the mouth of the 

Cumberland, to recoup their losses and reorganize, for Moll's map

362 The Fdson Club History Quarterly [ Vol. 6 

of 1720 (but'made from data probably gathered four or five years 

previously) shows a Shawnee town there, which must have been a 

transient town, as it does not occur on other maps, before nor 

after. Because there is no record of southern Shawnees settling 

anywhere else save in the Delaware country of Pennsylvania, and 

because this is the only group of Shawnces which the Cherokees 

kept away from the roads of eastern Tennessee and southwestern 

Virginia, which led to the Delaware country, these must have 

been the founders of the new Eskippakithiki in Kentucky. All 

other Shawnee movements from the South about this time seem to 

be accounted for by their going to the Delawares in Pennsylvania , 

or to the Creeks. 

On De Lisle's map of 1718 there is a "Tongoria" town in northeastern 

Kentucky. This word is thought to be a variant of "Taogria"--!ndians 

whom the French missionary, Father Gravier, in 

his Relation of 1700, says "spoke the Chaouanon tongue." The 

location of this town is not just where Eskippakithiki would be, 

but, of a map made up from verbal reports of Indians and ignorant 

traders, too much exactness must not be demanded. As we 

find no evidence of any other Indian town in Kentucky, at that 

time nor subsequently, we may safely begin to date the history of 

Estdppakithiki from a year or so before 1718, the date of this map. 

The late Dr. Cyrus Thomas, of the national Bureau of Ethnology, 

thought it was established about 1724--but upon what 

authority is unknown. Dr. Daniel G. Brinton, one of our greatest 

authorities on the eastern Indians, thought it was founded by 

those Shawnees who went from Carolina in 1731., But the report 

of James LeTort, the Pennsylvania Indian agent, shows that they 

came directly to the Potomac and thence to Pennsylvania.,° Besides, 

the Pennsylvania Shawnees were of the Hathawekela 

branch of the Shawnecs, while the Eskippakithikians were of the 

Pict branch, for which reason the traders always called it The 

Little Pict Town, to distinguish it from the larger Pict town near 

present Piqua, Ohio. 

Colonel John Johnston says that Black Hoof was born in 1731 ; 

and Black Hoof, while visiting the people of Indian 01d Fields in 

1816, told them that he was born there. Colonel Johnston also 

says that Black Hoof told him he was born in the South and remembered 

bathing in the sea when he was a boy. If he was born 

at Eskippakithild in 1731 and his family joined Chartier--of


whom later--and went south in 1748, he may have bathed in the 

sea when a boy. But Black Hoof made the settlers at Indian Old 

Fields believe that he was, at the time of his visit, over one hundred 

years old. If this were true, he might still have bathed in the 

sea when a boy, but could hardly have been born at Eskippakithiki. 

These two tales seem like an insoluble snarl. 

The letter of Postmaster Ficklin of Lexington, Kentucky, to 

Schooleraft, dated August 31, 1847, is probably the first effort to 

tell the story of Eskippakithiki. It gives a pioneer view of the 

history of some of the Shawnees who lived in this ancient Indian 

town. It is so lacking in definiteness that no historian heretofore 

has attempted to explain it. Btlt its pertinency to this story compels 

it to be incorporated here. Its explanation will be attempted 

by inserting in brackets the explanatory words or phrases. The 

pertinent extract is as follows: 

"A discontented portion of the Shawnee tribe, from Virginia 

[western Pennsylvania and Ohio were claimed by Virginia], broke 

off from the nation [Chartier's rebellion], which had removed to 

the Scioto country, in Ohio, about the year 1730 [1728], [he is here 

confused with the story of Lower Shawnee Town at the mouth of 

Scioto], and formed a town, known to the whites by the name of 

Lulbegrud [this was never true; Boone's deposition herein later 

given shows the correct pioneer usage of "Lulbegrud"], in what 

is now Clark county, about thirty miles east of this place [Lexington]. 

The tribe left this country about 1750 [1747] and went 

to East Tennessee, to the Cherokee Nation. [He is telling about 

Chartier's flight to the Cherokees in 1748, for the Esldppakithiki 

Shawnees went directly to Chillicothe when they left Eskippakithiki.] 

Soon after they returned to Ohio and joined the rest of the 

nation after spending a few years on the Ohio river, giving name 

to Shawneetown, in the State of Illinois, a place of some note at 

that time. [In this last statement it is clear that he is confusing 

two widel separated events: the abandonment of Eskippakithiki 

in 1754, and the return of the Chartier stragglers in 1761 

from Shawneetown.] This information is founded on the account 

of the Indians at the first settlement of this State, and .since confirmed 

by Black Hoof, a native of Lulbegrud, who visited this 

country in 1816," etc. 

Ficklin's three statements that "Lulbegrud" was founded by 

Chartier (who we know arrived there in 1745 and left by 1747) ;

364 The Filson Club History Quarterly [Vol. 6 

that the Shawnees left "Lnlbegrud" about 1750 [1747], implying 

that that was the last of the town; and that Black Hoof was born 

there, do not fit, in spite of the alleged confirmation of these statements 

by Black Hoof himself; for the latter, in his visit to Indian 

Old Fields ["Lulbegrud"] in 1816, told the settlers that he was 

born there and spent his boyhood there, pointing out to them 

places of interest he remembered; and further told them that he 

shot at Washington at Braddock's defeat in 1755. Now, had 

"Lulbegrud" been but the temporary creation of Chartier's tribe, 

as Ficklin's letter states, he left "Lulbegrud" when not over two 

years of age, too tender for remembering places and events, and 

was also a warrior at Braddock's defeat when not over ten years of 

age/ But in spite of its mistakes Ficklin's letter is a :emarkable 

document, containing many essences of fact, showing, however, 

the weaknesses of tradition and, inversely, the advantages which 

access to records have given the modern historian. 

THE FRENCH CENSVS OF 1736: In the seventeenth and part 

of the eighteenth centuries central Kentucky, as part of the Ohio 

Valley, was claimed by the French, who pretended to hold it 

against the Iroquois and seaboard English. This claim was a protection 

to our wandering Shawnees, since it made the Iroquois unwilling 

to attack them and made each party their defendant 

against the other. The Iroquois understood the Shawnee policy, 

for, in a council in 1770, they upbraided them for settling so far 

down the Ohio as to be beyond the Iroquois control. 

In 1736 the French-Canadian government made a census of 

the tribes connected with it and, as a gesture about their claim to 

the Ohio Valley by right of discovery, one of the enumerated 

tribes is the "Chaouanons, towards Carolina, two hundred men."11 

The French Canadians certainly would not claim the Shawneos 

1Ldng in Carolina, or Georgia, or Alabama, all of whom were beyond 

Canadian jurisdiction and under English control ; nor would 

they claim any others closer to Carolina than Kentucky, for they 

had no control of tlie Tennessee country, inhabited by the Chickasaws 

and Cherokees, who were too far away and, besides, strictly 

pro-English. To have been "towards Carolina," as described, 

these Shawnees would have had to have been south of the Ohio. 

On the Van Keulen map of 1720, only sixteen years prior to the 

census, the Kentucky River is set out as the "route qui los Francois 

tienient pour se rendre a la Caroline," which means the route

Voh 6] The Filson Club History Quarterly 365 

which the French take when they _resort to Carolina. Being on 

this "route" as well as on the Warriors' Trace from Ohio to Carolina, 

as shown on Evans' map of 1755, we have no alternative but 

to believe that this census is of our Eskippakithiki. Two hundred 

men implies from at least eight hundred to one thousand people. 

This town was then the metropolis of Kentucky, of Shawnee 

Kentucky, of Canadian Kentucky, of Iroquoian Kentucky, when 

all Kentuckians did homage to Louis, the Grand Monarque of 

France, serenely oblivious, in the distractions of his pleasure-seeking 

court, of the huddle of dusky savages who, in the deep forests 

of the New World, were achieving life and security under the 

psychologic influence of his potent name; and did homage also to 

the dusky diplomats and warriors of the "Long House" of the 

]roquois, in the far away valley of the Mohawk, more ' frightful 

and more potent, in time and place, than the Grand Monarque. 

Kentucky's present metropolis bears King Louis' name, but 

acknowledges no feudal sovereign, no swarthy overlords. 

ThE MURDEa OF THE SENECA CHIEF: A band of young Shawnees, 

at the time living on the upper Allegheny, in 1734 killed a 

chief of the Senecas, bringing upon themselves the wrath of the 

Iroquois and the Pennsylvania government. John and Thomas 

Penn, in a letter to the Senecas dated July 29, 1735, say that they 

understand that the Shawnees who killed the chief came to the 

Allegheny "about four years since," . . . "from the westward, 

or southward of the Ohio."2 This sounds like they came from 

Eskippakithiki, as it is the only Shawnee settlement that could be 

so described at that time. The murderers fled at once down the 

Ohio and, as they would not have dared to stop at the newly 

founded Lower Shawnee Town at the mouth of the Scioto, because 

it was too close to their enemies, they doubtless took refuge 

with their kin at Eskippakithiki, who had no love for the Senecas. 

THE CATAWBA SIEGE: This affront to the Scnecas, the 

strongest member of the Iroquois League at the time, may have 

been the cause of the Catawba attack on Eskippakitlfiki in 1736, 

two years later. Afraid to attack a town under French protection. 

because of their own vulnerability along the St. Lawrence French 

frontier, they may have sicked onto it the Catawbas, who were 

not only historically anti-French but were too far from the seat 

of French power to have any political qualms. Whatever the 

cause, the Catawbas fell on Eskippakithiki in 1736 and probably


hung around picking off hunters and stragglers, as the Indian 

mode of warfare was causing the affair to be spoken of as a siege. 

No incidents of this little war are known, but it is presumable that 

the murderers were hot caught, for if they had been, Iroquois 

action and satisfaction would have found some expression of it in 

contemporary records.l* About this time the Catawbas murdered 

and robbed two Pennsylvania traders "on the Ohio" an act which 

may be a part of this disturbance, but, if so, its connection with it 

is not proven. 

EARLY TRADERS: Between this time and the beginning of the 

French and Indian War many Pennsylvania and Carolina traders 

were struggling for the trade of the Ohio River and the interior 

peoples. Amongst them were James Le Tort, the interpreter; 

Hugh Crawford, a guide in the Mason & Dixon's Survey; Garrard 

Pendergrast, whose son was killed near Harrodsburg in 1777 (a 

descendant of whom was a commodore in the U. S. Navy in 1860) ; 

Anthony Sadowsky, father of the gallant "Sandusky" boys of our 

pioneer times; Robert Smith, whose men gave Chi'istopher Gist a 

mammoth's tooth on the Ohio River in 1751; Barnaby Curran, 

Washington's guide; Aaron Price; John Kennedy; the Harts; the 

Powels; and Peter Chartier, of whom later. There were many 

others, all of whom were in Kentucky and probably visitors at 

Eskippakithiki.,, 

LOWER SHAWNEE TOWN IN OHIO: The date of the founding 

of the Lower Shawnee Town is not known, but it is probably the 

new town mentioned in a letter from Beauharnois, governor of 

Canada, to the French Ministry, written October 1, 1728, which 

says that "the Shawnees have begun a town on the Ohio, containing 

150 families." It stood at the junction of the Ohio and Scioto 

rivers, and across the Scioto from the present Portsmouth, Ohio. 

By 1743 all of the Susquehanna Shawnees had removed to the 

"Allegheny," as the Pennsylvanians called the present Allegheny 

and the Ohio down to the mouth of the Wabash, settling from 

Logstown, just below the present Pittsburgh, to the Lower Shawnee 

Town, making the latter a place of supreme importance, political 

and economic, to the western Indians. In the later period 

of its history a number of cabins were built on the Kentucky side 

of the Ohio. Christopher Gist built a cabin on that side, as did 

other early traders. Its history is thrilling, but would swell this


paper inordinately; and therefore, can be mentioned here only for 

its connection with Eskippakithiki. 

THE STORY OF PETER CHARTIER: With the Pennsylvania 

Shawnees there came to the Allegheny one of the most interesting 

characters of the Old West: Peter Chartier, whose trading post, in 

the edge of what is now Pittsburgh, makes him one of that city's 

first captains of industry--one of the latest of whom, Andrew 

Mellon, has just been sent as ambassador to the Court of St. 

James. Peter was the half-Shawnee son of Martin ChaTtier, a 

Frenchman who, in 1679, helped LaSalle build The Crri: n, the 

first sailing vessel on the Great Lakes. Going on to'Illinois with 

him, he deserted the following winter, but after getting safely 

away to the Dutch in New York, foolishly returned to Canada, 

where he was thrown into prison, from which he escaped and returned 

to Illinois, where he joined his wife's people in a long 

flight up the Cumberland River and across Virginia and Maryland 

into Pennsylvania.,, There he settled and became a successful 

trader, dying in 1718. 

This same year Peter Chartier was licensed a trader at 

Conestoga, Pennsylvania, and, in 1730, married a Shawnee squaw 

and four years later moved to Allegheny, whither most of the 

Shawnees and Delawares had preceded him. He inherited his 

people's dislike for the English, whom he considered the cause of 

their Carolina troubles and the allies of the hated Iroquois. Some 

time before 1750, he began a secret correspondence with the 

French, his father's people.,B He is accused of instigating the murder 

of the Seneca chief, mentioned above, and of spreading propaganda 

amongst the Shawnees against the Iroquois, who were 

allies of the English. For this Governor Gordon, of Pennsylvania, 

reprimanded him, winning his personal hatred, which, with his 

anglomania, so peeved him that he accepted a commission in 

the French service. 

Inducing the chiefs Neuelieeonno, Taminy Buck, Misameathaquatha 

or Big Hominy, and The Pride, and others, amounting 

to about four hundred warriors and their families, to follow 

him, they dropped down the Ohio in their canoes, stopping perhaps 

at Lower Shawnee Town, from whence they traveled the 

Warriors' Path to Eskippakithiki; or perhaps continued down the 

Ohio to the mouth of the Kentucky, up which they paddled to 

Eskippaldthiki. Enroute they robbed every English trader they


met, upon the convenient theory that, having become Frenchmen, 

the English were their enemies. They reached our Little Pict 

Town, so snugly hidden behind hundreds of miles of wolfhaunted 

forests, in the lovely month of May, 1745, and there 

built themselves cabins. 

What part of the town Chartier's band built can not now be 

determined. Besides the stockade at the mound, on the Howard's 

Upper Creek scarp, the signs of which are still barely visible, there 

was another stockade in a big bottom below the scarp, the signs 

of which have been plowed away. All around these major remains 

the early settlers found signs of Indian cabins; scattered, as 

their custom was, here and there, with no design, northward a 

mile or so almost to Kiddville, and eastward, about the same distance, 

almost to the 0il Springs. The latter was the lick upon 

which they depended for deer, elk, and buffalo, and, of course, it 

was not proper to build too close to it for fear of scaring away the 

game. Pigeon roosts surrounded the town; its neighboring woods 

were filled with bears and turkeys, and its nearby streams with 

fish and turtles, making this one of the richest game regions on 

the continent. All the native fruits abounded, and the Indian 

staples of corn, pumpkins, beans, tobacco, sunflowers, and arti- 

• chokes, together with melons, potatoes, and other vegetables acquired 

from the whites, grew lushly in its virgin soil. But for the 

abysmal ignorance of its inhabitants--and the hardships, squalidness, 

superstition, and warfare that ignorance always hreeds-- 

Eskippakithiki would have been a Utopian delight. 

But such a horde as Chartier's was impossible: eating the 

stores, driving away the game, and by its mere presence threatening 

to bring upon its hosts the odium and vengeance of the English 

and the Iroquois, which they did not wish to incur in spite of 

their laws of hospitality and hardly secret sympathy with the 

rebels. The Iroquois sought them out and harrassed them until 

they were forced to flee beyond their power. How long they 

stayed there has been disputed. Dr. Lyman C. Draper thought 

they remained until 1747. Such a length of time is also suggested 

by the amount of land cleared, which, according to the early settlers, 

must have been several hundred acres. This date has further 

substantiation in the letter of Longueville, to be quoted later. 

Chartier's flight threw the borders from New York to Georgia 

into a frenzy of fear. It gave_ the Colonial governments their


first taste of the power of the French over the western Algonquians, 

and stimulated defensive measures everywhere. The 

history of this affair had become so forgotten and misunderstood 

by the nineteenth century that even so learned a historian of 

Western affairs as Dr. Reuben Gold Thwaites, in his Early Western 

Travels, says Peter Chartier took his Shawnees to the neighborhood 

of Detroit. In this Dr. Thwaites has doubtlessbeen 

misled by a letter written on October 28, 1745, by Governor Beauharnois 

to the French Ministry, which says: 

"The emigration of Chartier has at length taken place; they 

have removed from their former location to the place I allotted 

them at the Prairie of the Mascoutins; they have even tied and 

plundered the English traders on la Belle Riviere to the number of 

eight, and advise M. Longueville to send in search of them. But 

the detachment of fifteen or sixteen Canadians, despatched 

thither by that officer, discovered only one, and the Chaouanons 

-have said that they carried the others along with them to their 

winter quarters, and would bring them to me themselves next 

year."1, 

The Prairie of the Mascoutins was in southern Michigan and, 

had our renegade Shawnees gone there, Dr. Thwaites' location 

would have been correct, but they did not go there. On August 

24 and 25, 1747, Longueville wrote the governor of Canada: 

"The Chaouanons of Chartier's tribe, so far from coming to 

Detroit, according to invitation, have surprised some distant establishments 

[the Chickasaws] on the River of the Cheraquis and 

Alabanons [Tennessee]; though this Chartier, who has much influence 

over his tribe, excuses that evasion, assuring that it will 

not be prejudicial to the attachment of these Indians towards the 

French. It is to be feared either that he is not able to control 

them, or that he will himself change his opinion." 

The attack on the "distant establishments" on the Tennessee 

River will be given later. Beauharnois letter shows how Charger 

was toying with the French. The winter quarters therein mentioned 

were, of course, Esldppakithiki, where Longueville's detachment 

of Canadians visited them, finding only one of the despoiled 

traders. What a picture the conference between Chartier 

and the Canadians would make! 

Contemporary records of the years 1745 and 1746 are almost 

silent about Eskippakithiki and Chartier. This is additional rea-


son for assuming that his horde spent the winter of 1745-46 at 

Eskippakittfiki, far from Colonial eYes, and that in the intervening 

spring they put in a crop and continued there until harvest, at 

least, but more likely untilthe spring of 1747. One record notice 

of this time is interesting. John Ellis, a trader amongst the Catawbas 

in North Carolina, gives a glimpse of the panic Chart!er's 

flight caused the frontier folks, red and white, in a letter which he 

wrote for the Catawbas to the governor of Virginia, on May 10, 

1746. It begs for ammunition to "stand the brunt of Peter Chartier 

and his five hundred men, and the other troops which he expects 

to assist him." 

In 1747 Chartier and his followers got into their canoes and 

drifted with the spring floods down to the Tennessee and up it to 

Occachappo or Bear Creek, which they ascended for thirty miles, 

where they left their canoes and made an unprovoked attack upon 

the Chickasaws. They were quickly repulsed. James Adair, the 

accomplished Scotch Indian trader of South Carolina, in his History 

of the American Indians tells of his visit to them, and his effort 

to arrest Chartier: 

"In the year 1747 I headed a company of the cheerful, brave 

Chikkasahs, with the eagles tails, to the camp of the Shawano 

Indians, to apprehend one Peter Shartce, (a Frenchman) who, by 

his artful paintings, and the supine conduct of the Pennsylvanian 

government, had decoyed a large body of the Shawano from the 

English to the French interest. But, fearing the consequencies, 

he went round an hundred miles toward the Cheerake nation, 

with his family, and the head warriors, and thereby evaded the 

danger.... At the Shawano main camp, I saw a Pelmsylvanian, 

a white man by birth, and in profession a christian, who, 

by the inclemency of the sun, and his endeavors of improving the 

red color, was tarnished with as deep an Indian hue, as any of the 

camp.'U8 

This must have been the captive trader whom the Canadians 

found. Some of these renegades either returned at once to Eskippakithild 

(or, more likely had never left there), and the rest 

followed Cliartier to Alabama, where they settled amongst the 

Creeks. Their misdeeds and anti-English sentiments making 

them unwelcome, they wandered north again and, after a few 

years, had another fight with the Chickasaws in central Tennessee, 

in which they lost all of the horses they had stolen in the

Vol. 6] The Filson Club History Quarterly 371 

South. Then they tried to stem the Ohio to their kin at Lower 

Shawnee Town, but were worsted by the spring floods and were 

obliged to put into the mouth of the Wabash, where they built a 

town on the site of the present Shawneetown, Illinois, and remained 

until 1761, when they made their peace with the English 

and joined their kin at the mouth of the Scioto.,, Peter Chartier 

settled among the French in Illinois. The Chartier affair is the 

origin of the local tradition in Clark County that Eskippakithiki-- 

Indian Old Fields--was once the site of a French fort. 

Some of our historians have not been able to see anything in 

the story of our Little Pict Town save the Chartier episode and, 

like Dr. Lyman C. Draper, thought it disappeared with Chartier's 

departure in 1747 or 1748. On Lewis Evans' General Map of 

the Middle British Colonies in America, 1755, our town is located 

between "Warrior's Branch" [Red River] of the "Keatucke" and 

"Great Salt Lick River" [Licking River], and on "The Common 

Path to the Cuttawas Country" [The Warrior's Path]. On page 

44 of Franklin's Ohio Settlement, published in London in 1772, is 

the following: "In the year 1752, the Six Nations, Shawnees, and 

Delawares had a large town on Kentucky River," which statement 

gives us a "large town" there when John Findley arrived. 

JOHN FINDLEY'S ADVENTURE AT ESKIPPAKITItIKI: ° Dr. 

William Walker, in his trip to Kentucky in 1750, did not come as 

far west as Eskippakithiki and, therefore, does not mention it. 

Christopher Gist in 1751 must have been very near it, since he 

passed through Clark County on his return to Virginia, but he 

avoided it, doubtless because the Indians were not hospitable to 

the land hunter. However, they were hospitable to the trader, 

and this leads us to John Findley's adventure, which, to Kentuckians, 

is the most important incident in Eskippakithiki's 

history. 

A few years ago I wrote a biographical sketch entitled "John 

Findley: The First Pathfinder of Kentucky." It is published in 

The Filson Club History Quarterly, April, 1927 (Volume 1, No. 3, 

pages 111-122). As far as I am aware, it is the only attempt ever 

made at a history of John Findley, except Draper's brief account. 

I shall not present Findley's life here; it is too long and most of it 

impertinent to our story, but his character and two of his adventures 

are parts of the story of Eskippakithikl. They are also es-

372 The Filson Club History Quarterly [Vol. 6 

sential parts of the history of the beginning of the settlement of 

Kentucky and the Great West; and, as such, are retold here. 

Findiey was a Presbyterian Irishman who settled in Pennsylvania 

and adopted the business of an Indian trader. In this work 

the profits were large, if one could bring them home; but too often 

they were left afield, the prey of Indian cupidity and savagery, or 

lost in some accident of flood or forest. Occasionally the trader's 

scalp became the prized trophy of a savage despoiler. Findley's 

life was a continual round of adventure, with Death always snapping 

at his heels and Loss his constant companion, but he passed 

debonairely through it all, never giving up, wringing from reluctant 

Fate the success of dauntless character, of invincible and 

respected manhood,-and nothing else. 

In the fall of 1752 he put a stock of goods in canoes and, with 

four white servants, dropped down the Ohio on a trip that was to 

bring him disaster but make him a secure place in history. He 

proceeded to The Falls, now Louisville, where he hoped to meet 

hunting parties of Indians whom he could outfit and in return 

gain a lien on their winter's catch of furs." He fmmd no one there, 

so he turned back to Big Bone Lick, in now Boone County, Kentucky, 

where he met a party of Shawnees, returning from a hunt 

in Illinois, who invited him to come with them to their home at 

Eskippakithild, promising him a good trade. Turning his canoes 

- '---..up the Kentucky River, he unloaded them on the banks of 

I-lb ward's Upper Creek, at Eskippakithiki. There he built a 

house with a stockade around it, unpacked his goods, and made 

ready for the fall and winter fur campaign. 

A story about this unpacking has been banded down by the 

mouth of his comrade of later years, Daniel Boone, who told it to 

his nephew, Daniel Bryan, who in turn told it to Dr. Lyman C. 

Draper. It is to the effect that he packed his trade goods at Lancaster, 

Pennsylvania, with hay made of English grass or, as we 

now call it, bluegrass. It had been imPorted to that rich limestone 

region from the farms of the motherland across the sea. 

When Findlcy threw this packing aside on the rich limestone land 

at Eskippakithiki, it generated and spread and was the first bluegrass 

to grow in Kentucky. Twenty-five years later, when the 

whites came to settle, they found no bluegrass in central Kentueky, 

save at Grassy Lick,, in Montgomery County and at 

Indian Old Fields.

Vol. 6] The Filson Club History Quarterly 373 

But Findley's dream of peace and profits was to be rudely 

shattered. On January 28, 1753, there came along the Warrior's 

Trace a party of seventy Christian Conewago and Ottawa Indians, 

a French Canadian, and a renegade Dutchman named 

Philip Phflips, all from the St. Lawrence River, upon a scalphunting 

expedition against the Southern Indians. Twenty-five 

miles south of Eskippakithiki, near the head of Station Camp 

Creek in Estill County, upon the Warriors' Trace, they met a 

party of seven Pennsylvania traders, consisting of James Lowry, 

David Hendrieks, Alexander MeGinty, Jabez Evans, Jacob 

Evans, William Powell, Thomas Hyde, and their Cherokee servant. 

They attempted to take this Cherokee scalp, so providentially 

placed in their .power, but the whites objecting, a fight 

ensued in which one of the Indians was shot in the arm; whereupon 

they took all of the whites prisoners, although in time of 

peace, and turned back towards Canada. 

At Eskippakithiki they got into an altercation with John 

Findley, who doubtless tried to help his fellow traders, killed 

three of his servants and took all of his property, compelling him 

and his remaining servant, John Faulkner, to flee through the 

winter woods to Pennsylvania. Lowry and the Cherokee escaped 

three days later, but the rest of the captured traders were taken to 

Canada, and later two of them even to France, before they were 

rescued and all brought back home. 

ORIGIN OF THE NAME KENTUCKY: The report of this affair, 

sent to the Pennsylvania government by Virginia's agent amongst 

the Allegheny Indians, Major William Trent, is probably the 

earliest record in any of the Colonies that contains the word "Kentucky." 

In part, it is as follows: 

"I have received a letter just now from Mr. Croghan,'wherein 

he acquaints me that fifty-odd Ottawas, Conewagos, one Dutchman, 

and one of the Six Nations, that was their captain, met with 

some of our people at a place called Kentucky [italics are mine] on 

this side Allegheny river, about one hundred and fifty miles from 

the Lower Shawnee Town. They took eight prisoners, five belonging 

to Mr. Croghan and me, the others to Lowry; they took 

three or four hundred poul ds worth of goods from us; one of them 

made his escape after he had been a prisoner three days. Three 

of John Findley's men are killed by the Little Piet Town, and no 

account of himself.. . There was one Frenchman in the 

Company."


Kentucky is spelled in this report just as we spell it now and 

is used as a name for Eskippakithiki. His expression, "this side 

Allegheny river," means on the English or the east and south 

side. The l'."reneh claimed that LaSalle descended the upper Ohio 

in 1669 while the English claimed that he descended the Wabash 

and called it Ohio. This was the geographic issue in the French 

and Indian War, so soon to follow Trent's report, and he did not 

propose to call the upper river "Ohio" and thus seem to acknowledge 

French pretensions thereto. As this was twenty years before 

Dragging Canoe, at the Watauga Treaty, called the Transylvania 

Purchase a "Dark and Bloody Ground," it disposes of those sinister 

words as the supposed meaning of "Kentucky." Since Trent 

received his information indirectly from the Conewagos, who 

were Iroquoians, he calls the "place" by its Iroquoian name, KentuckT. 

Kenta is an Iroquoian root-word, seen in many combinations 

and various spellings, which means "level"; and those who 

have seen the 3,500 acres of level, prairie country at Indian Old 

Fields, can appreciate the relevancy of the name to that place. 

As the Kentucky River is the one which was taken to reach 

the "place called Kentucky," by those who came by water from 

western New York or Pennsylvania, it was called the "Kentucky" 

River, just as the Illinois, the Miami, the Mohawk, and many 

other rivers of our continent have been named. As all of the 

earliest settlements were on the Kentucky waters, except Harrodstown, 

which was only five miles from the main stream, they were 

spoken of collectively as the "Kentucky Settlements," just as the 

people of that day spoke of the Monogahela Settlements, the 

Cumberland Settlements, the Yadkin Settlements, the Holston 

Settlements, etc. The same root, kenta, occurs in the word "Kentayenton-ga," 

which was the Iroquois name for the more level 

country reached by the traveler down the Ohio--about Adams 

County, Ohio, and Lewis County, Kentucky--after breaking 

through the rough sandstone hills and narrow bottoms of the 

coal-bearing country. Kentuckians of today describe these 

two topographic proxdnces by the words "Mountain" and 

"Bluegrass."- 

THE FRENCH AND INDIAN WAR: The French 'and Indian War 

was declared in 1755, and John Findley joined Braddock's army. 

There he met a young wagoner, Daniel Boone, whom he regaled 

with stories of his adventure at Kentucky, in the level cane-land

Vol. 6 ] Ti e Filson Club History Quarterly 375 

beyond the Allegheny Mountains, and with accounts of its rich 

corn lands and herds of deer and buffalo, stories which were to 

bear important fruit. 

The red burghers of Eskippakithiki, taking the loyal French 

view that their royal master, the King of France, would drive the 

English into the sea, in the doing of which high values would be 

set upon their arms and they .would be able to take many scalps 

and rich pillage, decided to move nearer to the seat of war. So, in 

1754, after the fall of Fort Necessity, and perhaps after gathering 

their autumn crops, they joined the rest of the Shawnees in the 

Scioto Valley, thus abandoning Eskippakithiki and Kentucky as 

a residence of the red man forever. And this is how it happened 

that Kentucky sent a body of troops to Braddock's Defeat, but 

on the French side. Years afterwards Black Hoof told how he and 

others, in that battle, had shot at Washington repeatedly, but 

could not hit him; and how they inferred therefrom that he bore 

a charmed life. This would be the end of the story of Eskippakithiki 

had it not lingered in the memory of Findley and continued 

to intrigue Boone. 

FINDLEY LEADS BOONE TO KENTUCKY: The story of how 

Findley led Daniel Boone and company to Kentucky has been 

told so often and so well that a repetition is unnecessary. He 

took them right to Eskippakithiki," whose stockades and most of 

whose houses they found burnt to the ground, and they built a 

camp under a giant sycamore on the Combs Fork of Lulbegrud, 

near what is now the old Clay distillery mill dam. Lulbegrud is 

not an Indian name. In a deposition in the Clark County clerk's 

office--which had lain forgotten for almost a century until my 

father, the late Judge William M. Beckner, of Winchester, rediscovered 

it and passed it out to our historians--it is told with 

charming simplicity, by Daniel Boone himself, how Lulbegrud got 

its name. The book in which it is preserved is now labeled "Depositions," 

but was formerly known as "Processioners' Book," containing 

depositions given in processioning land claims, a process. 

of taking proof on the land in dispute. This deposition is given in 

behalf of the claim of George Smith and is found on page 156. It 

is as follows: 

"The Deposition of Daniel Boone, being of lawful age, taken 

before us, the subscribing Commissioners, this 15th day of September, 

1796; being first Duly Sworn, Depo'seth and sayth that


WN otr p/e t¢$ A " INOIA# 01. l 'l Lo.¢ 

#" RR Co #it 

/. ./3,/-,,,,.k.. J,/.,-,,,,, - • 

• 

. , , . , _4. ., . 

This is the William D. Hixon map of 1886. Judged by its items still discernible 

it is a good one, and creates a presumption of accuracy as to the remainder of its 

items. It is the only m p known to the author which attempts areeonstruetion of 

Eskippakithiki. The name following "8" should read "Beasly's."

Voh 6] The Filson Club History Quarterly 377 

in the Year 1770 I Incamped on Red River with five other men 

and we had for our amusement the History of Samuel Gulivers 

Travels wherein he gives an account of his young Mistress Glumdeclik 

earriing him on a Market Day for a show to a town called 

Lulbergrud a young man of our Company Called Alexander Neely 

came to Camp one Night and told us he had been that Day to 

Lulbergrud and had killed two Brobdernags in their Capital. 

there was no place in this County went by that name of the log 

Lick until the year 1795 when William and Major Beezley Cut a 

number of Trees Down in and about this Lick we are now at in 

order to ketch Buffalows and from that time some people called 

this the Log Lick," etc. 

From this it is seen that Lulbegrud is a corruption of Lorbrulgrud, 

the capital of Brobdinag, the land of giants, which, according 

to Dean Swift, Gulliver discovered on the northwest coast of 

America. The present Oil Springs was the "capital" and the 

buffalos lingering around them, the "Brobdernags."l, 

WHAT THE SETTLERS FOUND AT INDIAN OLD FIELDS: A large 

part of the Indian Old Fields was patented by a company from 

Berkeley County, Virginia, composed of General Marquis Calmes, 

and son, Marquis, Jr., Edward Berry, and Ben and Cuthbert 

Combs. The two Combs were brothers, and their mother was a 

sister of Colonel Thomas Bullitt, the pioneer of Louisville. William 

Risk, an intelligent settler, some sixty years later, gave Rev. 

John D. Shane the following description: 

"I heard one of the partners, Gen. Calmes, say the Old Fields 

were all covered with bluegrass when he first saw it [in 1775]. And 

when I first saw it, it was very high with grass, as high, some, as a 

horse's back, and with a head to it.... There were sprouts of 

white hiccory, and cherry tree, and black locust, and black walnut, 

all through the Old Field . . . There were stumps, some off 

as high as a chair back, and around these stumps were trees, some 

of them would make five rail cuts.... Suppose some of the 

trees had been cut down to put up a white oak pole cabin that 

was . . . there and looked old when the partners were taking up 

the land.... It was known as the cabin on the white oak point. 

It is now on Leonard Beall's land, joining to Mrs. Goff's down on 

Howard's creek. The cabin was hardly one-half mile from the 

gate posts.... Ben Combs said he did not know who made it. 

• . . The posts were two, of black walnut, about as far apart as a

This is a map of the 

"old intrenchment" 

marked "3" in the ac- 

-q 

O0 

companying map by 

William D. Hixon. The ;: 

elevation in the circle 

rises four feet above the .. 

plain. One-foot contour 

intervals would make 

too many lines upon the 

sharply rising mound, so 

five-foot intervals are 

used.. The line beyond 

the tree and the bow and 

arrows, represents the 

upper edge of the scarp, 

from which the slope to 

Howard's Upper Creek 

is very steep. For many 

years the settlers plowed 

up, from the line of the 

circle, the burnt-off stubs 

of the palisade. 

4


gate would be.... The gate posts and cabin were then old when 

these men went to make the entries there.... A squaw ax, 

queensware, ax all eye, gun barrel, which I think I saw, etc., 

ploughed up.... Down where Eastin's Mill is . . . there was 

a sign of corn hills there. It was down by Lulbegrud, as if the 

fence had all rotten down, and the place overgrown with weeds."26 

In 1886 William D. Hixon, of IY[aysville, sent to Dr. Lyman 

C. Draper a sketch map entitled "Plan of works at Indian Old 

Fields, Clark Co., Ky." It is in the archives of The State Historical 

Society of Wisconsin and is designated as 7C1. It sets out 

the locations of the remains of Eskippakithiki as found by the 

white settlers and shows their relations to Howard's Upper Creek 

and Lulbegrud Creek. From this it is seen--what the local people 

have always known--that the village was on Howard's Upper 

Creek, rather than on Lulbegrud; but the latter name sounded so 

much like an Indian word that Ficklin, Brinton, Draper, and 

most of the early historians, were attracted by it and considered 

it the proper stream near which to locate the town. 

CATAHECASSA OR BLACK HOOF, INDIAN CHIEF: Clark County 

sent a company to the War of 1812 under Captain Asa K. Lewis, a 

grandson of General Andrew Lewis, the hero of Point Pleasant. 

Amongst his soldiers was a young man named Beall, who was 

captured at the River Raisin and ordered to run the gauntlet. 

Black Hoof, learning that he was a native of Indian Old Fields, 

claimed him and took him to his own cabin and protected him 

until he could return home. Upon invitation, Black Hoof spent 

the spring and summer of 1816 with his young friend, going over 

again the scenes of his boyh(iod, meeting the people and telling 

them tales of the Indian days of yore. He had been the friend of 

the Americans throughout the War, and everywhere was the 

honored guest. He told them he had been born there over a hundred 

years before, which is at variance with the story of his life 

secured from him by Colonel John Johnston. There is a picture 

of him published in Smith's History of Kentucky, the original of 

which Smith says, in 1900, belongs to the Polytechnic Society of 

Louisville. That Society's effects were later" acquired by the 

Louisville Free Public Library but this picture is not among them. 

Otto A. Rothert, secretary of The Filson Club, made a careful 

search there and elsewhere for the original and is still trying to 

locate it.

38O The Filson Club History Quarterly [Vol. 6 

CONCLUSmN: In 1888, under the supervision of my mother, 1 

assisted in s'mking a pit in the center of the mound on the 

Howard's Upper Creek scarp, down to the original ground. We 

went through several hearths, containing charcoal and shells, and 

in the lowermost one was found the burnt-off stub of a post 

around which were charcoal and burnt human bones, suggesting, 

as we thought, the torture of a prisoner--a form of amusement 

much delighted in by aboriginal Americans. 

In 1929 I made a careful map of this mound and the circle beside 

it, drawing contours of elevation of one foot on the circle. 

The rapidity with which the circle is disappearing by plowing 

will cause it to vanish in the near future. My map will aid in restoring 

it, should the state of Kentucky gain enough pride to make 

a park of that place from which it receives its name. 

There is another mound near by, on the farm of the Hen. 

John W. Swope. There was one on the hill above the mill dam of 

the old Clay distillery, which has now probably disappeared, for 

it was barely observable about twenty years ago. These are all 

that now remain of the first "Kentucky," the one-time capital 

and metropolis of the land where Kentucky history was made be- 

fore Boone was heard of. 

If you wish to take an interesting trip, go to Esldppakithiki 

and view its vanishing mounds and circle; go to the Oil Springs 

and see picturesque Lulbegrud, where, if you can cast a dainty 

fly, you may catch a small-mouthed bass, the gamest of our fish; 

then climb Pilot Knob and look out for miles and miles over Indian 

Old Fields and the far-reaching levels of the Bluegrass be- 

yond; and stand where Findley and Boone stood when they 

viewed their promised land. If you do, you will see the majestic 

vision that should have been pictured in the lune of the State 

capitol, where Findley's and Boone's first view of Kentucky is 

attempted. You will then realize what was missed when ignorance 

caused this incident to be depicted as taking place on the 

river cliffs near Frankfort--a very tame picture by comparison 

with the view from the "eminence" at Indian Old Fields, where 

Findley and Boone "saw with pleasure the beautiful level of 

Kentucky."


The Shawnee name Eskippakithiki being all but impossible to 

Anglo-Saxon tongues, was early forgotten, but "Kentucky," the 

Iroquoian name for the same place, being delightfully easy to pronounce, 

has lived on as the name of our State. 

i Eskippakithiki is called the last Indian town in Kentucky with a full realization 

that during the whole life of the Lower Shawnee Town on the north bank of the 

Ohio, at the mouth of the Seioto there were cabins w th their Indian residents 

upon the opposite south bank of t e Ohio. Christopher Gist built a cabin on the 

south side in 1751; and a trading company consisting of Colonel George Croghan 

William Trent, Robert Calendar, and Michael Teaft had a store there in 1754, at the 

time the French and Indian outbreak drove the English traders out of the Ohio 

Valle r, but these cabins.never constituted an organized town; they were but an 

outlying part of the town on the north bank of the Ohio, where their residents 

exercised their rights of citizenship. It would be impossible to separate thehistory 

of the few Kentucky cabins on the south bank from the history of the main 

Lower Shawnee Town opposite them on the north shore of the Ohio. 

2 In the course of their troubled history the Shawnees were driven at various 

times by Iroquois, Miamis, Catawbas, Chickasaws, Cherokees, Natchez, South 

Carolinians, Pennsylvanians, Virginians, the British government, Kentuckians, and 

the United States forces; and they have fled for protection to the Siouans. Yuchis, 

French, Chickasaws, Cherokees Creeks Spanl sh, South Carolinians, Natchez 

Mohicans, New Yorkers, Delawares Pennsylvanians, Six Nations, and the British 

in Canada, yet at the close of their active career they were our most valiant Indian 

foes. 

s Franquelin's map of 1688. See Narrative and Critical History of America, Justin 

Winsor, Vol. IV, pp. 230-231. 

4 On November 12, 1755, Colonel George Croghan wrote James Hamilton, "the 

Six Nations, while they stand neuter . . . have already settled some of the Upper 

Cherokees on Kentucky, a creek near the Lower Shawnee Town." This reference is 

mystifying. It is possible that, when the Shawnees left Kentucky, the Six Nations 

induced some Overhill Cherokees to move into Kentucky, possibly into the deserted 

houses and abandoned cornfields of the Shawnees at our village, thus holding the 

land against the French, whose dominion the Six Nations did not wish extended, but 

nothing else about this is definitely known. Possibly it was a Six Nations' tale to 

please .the British• Possibly, also, Colonel Croghan was mistaken, as about this 

time he wrote another letter in which he mentions the Hoiston as a head stream of 

the Kentucky River a mistake that can be seen in nearly all of the early maps, and 

the settlement mentioned by him may have been merely one of the Hoiston Cherokee 

towns. In their sale to the Transylvania Company the Cherokees made no claim 

to any country north of the Kentucky River. 

* See Ludwell Papers in the archives of the Virginia Historical Society published 

by D. I. Bushnell, Jr., in American Anthropologist, new seriesj Vol. X No. 4 pp. 

568 574. 

7 Catahecassa was one of the greatest leaders the Shawnees produced during the 

period of their greatest activity. He was present at Braddoek's defeat, in 1755j 

where he says he shot at Washington many times, but, being unable to hit him, decided 

that he bore a charmed life. He was at Point Pleasant in 1774, as a prominent 

officer on the Indian side. He was one of the head chiefs at Harmar's andSt. C air s 

defeats and at Wayne's victory. After this last he ceased to struggle against the 

whites, deeming it hopeless. He was a well versed historian, courageous leader, 

and a persuasive orator. As head chief of the Shawnees he kept most of them from 

followm" g Tecumseh to the British in the War of 1812. He died at Wapakoneta, Ohio, 

in 1831. For a sketch of his life see Handbook of American Indians, Vol. 1, p. 212,' 

and Vol. II, p. 535. 

* Historical CoUectious of Louisiana and Florida, New Series, p. 123. 

• * Dr. Daniel G. Brinton, Historical Magazine, 1866, Vol. X, p. 1. 

1o The Wilderness Trail, Charles A. Hanna, in two vohunes, 1911, Vol. II, p. 130. 

1 Enumeration of the Indian tribes connected with the government of Canada. 

(1736.) The authorship of this has been ascribed to Joncairep Chauirguiere, and 

Celoron Jr.


1 Pennsylvania Colonial Records, Vol. III, p. 660; and Wilderness Trail, Hanna, 

Vol. I, pp. 302-303. 

1, The reason for attributing this Catawba siege to Eskippakithiki is not strong. 

The siege may have been of the Lower Shawnee Town, or even of one of the Allegheny 

towns. As Eskippakithiki was the first town the Catawbas met on the Great 

War Trace going north, it is most likely the town attacked. The burden of proof 

lies against the claim of any other locality. 

14 Hanna, in his Wilderness Trail, has given a long list of these traders who were 

on the Ohio early and in it many interesting names occur. He has made all Ohio 

Val ey historians indebted to him for his wonderful collection of facts. 

16 This flight of Martin Chartier up the Cumberland River and over Cumberland 

Gap into Virginia took place in the year 1692" which makes him possibly the second 

white man to visit the interior of Kentucky. ossibly Gabriel Arthur preceded him, 

but Arthur's being in Kentucky is not as thoroughly proven as is Martin Chattier's; 

and La Salle's alleged trip down the Ohio in 1669 is perhaps less proven than 

Arthur's, although France and England had a war about it. Maryland Council Pro. 

ceedings, Vol. III, pp. 341-350, etc.; and Wilderness Trail, Hanna, Vol. I, p. 175, et 

seq. For Gabriel Arthur's story see "The Discovery of Kentucky," by Dr. Willard 

Rouse Jillson, in Register of the Kentucky State Historical Societ;d, May, 1922. 

1, A letter from the Marquis de Beauharnois to the French Ministry, dated October 

1, 1740, says: "the Sieur de Noyon writes me that, as soon as the Hurons leave, 

the Chaouanons will come and take their place . . . they are very docile" and the 

individual named [Peter] Chartier seems very well disposed." This was We years 

before Chartier's rebellion. 

DJManuscripttroit ", Vol . ,p. Letter1 09. in the Burton Historical Collection of thc uhlio ibrary, 

is The History of the American Indians, James Adair London (1775) p. 3. 

tg On Mitchell's map for 1755 there is located, in Alabama, on the Locushatchee 

branch of the Alabama River "Cayomulgee Saunanoos from the Ohio " evidently 

Chartier's horde or what was left of them. Early History of the Creek Indians and 

their Neighbors, J r. John R. Swanton, Bulletin 73 Bureau of American Ethnology, 

Smlthsonian Institution, Washington, 1922; map pocket. 

20 Dr. Archibald Henderson, of the University of North Carolbm, in answer to 

my questioning, aided and encouraged me to compile the known data about John 

Findleyinto a biography Hanna in his Wilderness Trail, Vol lI pp 213-229 pub- 

. , . • 2 • 

hshed Dr. Lyman C. Draper's " ccount of John Finley," and gives new data and 

suggests sources. My thanks are due to these splendid historians of the Old West for 

many items in this paper. 

2t For Grassy Lick see "History in Circuit Court Records, Fayette County," 

abstracted by Charles R. Staples, Lexington,and published in Register of the Kentucky 

State Historical Society, July, 1932. It has often been said that no one of our 

time can write a book about Kentucky without Charley Staples being in it, so great 

is his historic zeal so careful is his work, and so helpful does he make himself when 

an opportunity presents itse f. 

The capture of these traders is set out fully in Hanna's 1Vilderness Trail, Vol. 

II pp 230 231 252-256 where those who are interested can read of it. The llmitatmns 

of space prohibit its story in this paper. 

23 Hanna's Wilderness Trail, in a note to page 215, in Volume II, says: " 'Indian 

Old Corn Fields,' where this town stood, were so called by Kentucky settlers after 

1800; located about eleven miles east of Winchester, in Clark County, Kentucky. 

The present hamlet of Indian Fields, on Lulbegrud Creek, marks the site of these 

fields and probably, also, the site of Eskippakithiki. The Iroquois name for 'the 

place of many fields,' or 'prairie,' as applied to this tract of land (containing about 

3000 acres) was kenta-ke from whence comes the name of the state in which they 

are situate .: 

' Theodore Roosevelt in his Winning of the West publishes this deposition, and 

interprets "Brobdernags" as Indians, hut against this interpretation local tradition 

in Clark County, preserved by the late Judge James Flanagan, who knew George 

Smith for whom the deposition was given, and others, says that the "Brohdernags" 

were the giant buffalos. 

2a Shane papers in Draper Manuscripts, 11 CC 86-90, Wisconsin State Historical 

Society's Collections.

Eskippakithiki, The Last Indian Town in Kentucky - The Filson ...

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