the filson club history quarterly - The Filson Historical Society

214 The Filson Club History Quarterly [Vol. 29
This would make it near the present Berea in Madison County, Kentucky,
u° Having lost their granite axes in fight or flight they made
new ones of sandstone which could not cut wood but could crack
skulls. Fort Ancient in southern Ohio dates from this time. There
are many other forted hilltops in the Akan land, makeshift and feeble,
but each declaring defiance and defense; and each helpless against
firearms.
The Catawba tradition further tells that they left the Kentucky fort
and fled along the Warriors' Path through Cumberland Gap into Virginia.
The Virginia records21 tell how the horde irrupted into Virginia
six hundred strong; how in 1656 they whipped a Virginia army
under Colonel Hill; and how Colonel Abram Wood was then sent
against them who induced the desperate "Rickahockans" to move south
towards the Carolinas.
In this same year one band of them asked admission into the Creek
Confederacy and were settled on the Tallapoosa River, in Georgia,
calling their town Tucket Batchet, "the town of the refugees.''m
Here we must leave them to their modern historians and watch the
spreading Iroquois fury.
The Iroquois now assailed the Akaos next beyond, the Honiosants,
Nyhyssans, Monohysanoughs, Onasiotos of the Scioto Valley; the
Mesopeleas (Monsouperias) of southeastern Ohio, West Virginia, and
northeastern Kentucky; the Cheskapes and Misseouians of central Kentucky;
the Akans of southern Indiana and the Wabash Valley; and
others whose names are not given on the maps or elsewhere. Some
fled through Cumberland Gap but most took to their canoes and fled
down the Ohio.
There are but few data about them. There are two forts on
Harrod's Creek in Oldham County, Kentucky, built evidently in a
hurry, which can safely be attributed to the fleeing Akans? 3
Some stopped at The Falls for awhile, as a Seneca chief tells La Salle
they were there in 1669; and a pile of whitened human bones was
found by the Virginia settlers on Sandy Island just below The Falls.
Tobacco, a Miami chief, told General George Rogers Clark they were
relics of a battle after which the ancient inhabitants fled down the
river and Kentucky was lost.
Col. James F. Moore, of Kentucky, was told by an old Indian that
the early Kentuckians had perished in a war waged against them by
Indians, and that in the last great battle the defenders were driven
to a small island below the Ohio Falls where they were cut to pieces.
Cornstalk told Colonel McKee, commander on the Kanawha, that
Ohio and Kentucky had once contained a white people, familiar with
arts of which the Indians [Algonquians and Iroquois] knew nothing,