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

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

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