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

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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
Vol. 6 ] The Fdson Club History Quarterly 359 opposition to the white advance, which was a longer time than the opposition of any other Indian people except the Iroquois. Having no European arms in the seventeenth century, they were compelled to flee from the well-armed Iroquois. Some fled to the Miamis, north of the Ohio, uniting with them against the common enemy and winning for both swift Iroquoian vengeance; others fled along the Warriors' Path, through the Cumberland Gap, to the Spanish in Florida. LaSalle invited the few left in Kentucky to come to Illinois, where he built Fort St. Louis, in 1681, for their protection. There some of the Shawnees built a new Chaskepe, and became children of Louis XIV, King of France, and were inoculated with sympathies which governed much of the subsequent Shawnee history. Since then, with the exception of Eskippakithiki, a few houses opposite Lower Shawnee Town at the mouth of the Scioto, and a temporary village or two, there have been no Indian residents in Kentucky.* THE SHAWNEES IN CAROLINA: The'Warriors' Path or Trace crossed the Ohio River at the mouth of Cabin Creek in Mason County, Kentucky, below the mouth of the Scioto, where Portsmouth, Ohio, now stands. This Trace ran to the Upper Blue Licks, in Fleming County; thence to Eskippakithiki, which the white settlers later renamed Indian Old Fields, in Clark County; thence up Station Camp Creek, in Estill County, to the Pictured Caves at its head near the mouth of Red Lick Creek; thence through the low hills of Jackson County to the Flat Lick near Barbourville, in Knox County; and thence out of Kentucky through Cumberland Gap: and along tl e back border of the Carolinas to the Spanish settlements in Georgia and Florida. This was from prehistoric times a major trade route down which went copper, northern furs, and glacial pebbles for making stone axes; and up which came sea-shells, southern plumage, and mica. Georgia, at the time this story begins, had not been settled by the English and was considered a part of Florida, the Spanish having settlements on the coast and gold mines in the interior. Upon the southern end of this Trace the Shawnees--or Savannahs as they were there called--bnilt their towns, on the waters of the Savannah River, from whence they robbed the Spanish and traded with the South Carolina English for the firearms and edged tools which had become so necessary for their existence. Rich in per-
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Eskippakithiki, The Last Indian Town in Kentucky - The Filson ...

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