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

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