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

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360 The Filson Club History Quarterly [ Vol. 6 sonality, they impressed their names on the Savannah and Suwanee Rivers. In 1680 they made their welcome in their new homes secure by siding with the South Carolinians in their war against the Yuehi Indians. In 1706, however, braves from one of the Savannah towns killed several whites, perhaps in North Carolina, which government sent a militia force and a band of Catawba Indians against the offending town. The result is not known, but many of the Shawnees fled about this time to the Delawares, their Algonquian kin in Pennsylvania. ESKIPPECK ON THE APALACHICOLA: The next year, 1707, Lamhatty, a southern Indian who had been taken captive to Virginia, made a statement to Beverly, the Virginia historian, about the Indians of the South and drew a map to illustrate his story. Upon this map he placed a town on the lower Apalachicola River that, in the published versions, is printed "Ephippeck," which is very unlike other Southern Indian names. It never appears on later maps, perhaps because the Apalachicola was raided about that time by the Tuscaroras and many of its denizens scattercd. The word is evidently a misreading for Eskippeek, in which the obsolete long form of s, which looks like a p, was used; it was followed by a k, in which the final loop is so open that it has been mistaken for an h. This word was used as a town name possibly by the same Shawnees who came from the Skipaki eipi in Kentucky (eipi means river in Algonquian tongues, as seen in the word Mississippi). They are probably the Shawnees who, about this time, started back to Kentucky to build their new Eskippaki at Indian Old Fields. In support of this supposition there are not only the identity of names and a conformity in timeliness but also the fact that Catahecassa or Black Hoof (for years head chief of the Shawnccs until Teeumseh rebelled against him in his old age, and who had been a resident of Eskippakithiki), told Colonel .lohn Johnston, the Federal Indian agent amongst the Ohio and Indiana tribes from 1812 to 1842, that his people came from the South where they had lived not far from the sea. The upper waters of the Savannah, where most of the southern Shawnecs lived, were some distance from the sea, and its lower waters Were settled by whites; but on the lower waters of the Apalachicola, Eskippeck was closer to the Gulf and had no white neighbors.
Vol. 6 ] The Filson Club History Quarterly 361 Ramsey in his Annals of Tennessee gives us an incident in the northward trek of what must have been the Shawnees Who settled in Kentucky, because they are too far west to have been those who went to Permsylva a. He says: "M. Charlcville, a French trader from Crozat's colony at New Orleans, came in 1714 among the Shawnees, then inhabiting the country on the Cumberland river; and traded with them. His store was built on a mound, near the present site of Nashville." Here, he says, the Shawnees had "forted themselves, and maintained a protracted war for the possession (if their country." However, the Chickasaws and Cherokees, not liking such squatters in their richest hunting country, soon drove them out. Pcnicaut, the French missionary, in his Relation for 1714 says, that he "found, among the Natchez, some slaves belonging to the nation of the Chaouanons who had been captured by a strong party of Chickasaws, Yazous, and Natchez, who, under the pretext of visiting their village for the purpose of dancing the calumet of peace, had attacked them in the most base and treacherous manner, and killed their grand chief, dth most of his family, took eleven prisoners, among whom was the wife of the chief, and brought them to Natchez."8 There seems to have been no game laws protecting the poor, wandering, home-hunting Shawnees. The only places open to these fleeing Eskippeckians were the French settlements in Illinois, the deserted Kentucky country, the Creek towns in Georgia and Alabama, and the Delaware country in Pennsylvania. Had they gone to Illinois the French records would have shown it. To go south to the Creeks would be to go back into that from which they were fleeing. East and west were closed to them by the vigilant Cherokees and Chickasaws. To go north of the Ohio and east of the French influence would put them in the country also claimed by the dread and jealous Iroquois, their ancient enemies. The route to the Delawares led through hostile Cherokee or Iroquois territory, and therefore for the time impassible. Their most probable route was down the Cumberland to the Ohio, thence up it to a settlement in central Kentucky--to the land where many of them had been born, but which had been vacant ever since their flight from it thirty or forty years before. They must have stopped for a year or so at the mouth of the Cumberland, to recoup their losses and reorganize, for Moll's map
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