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

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370 The Filson Club History Quarterly [ Vol. 6 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-
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