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

368 The Filson Club History Quarterly [ Vol. 6
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