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

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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."
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