generally 200 feet wide.”10
From British Indian agent George Croghan's journals, dated from 1750 to 1765, came these observations, “We went to the great lick … On our way we passed through a fine timbered clear wood; we came into a large road which the buffaloes have beaten, spacious enough for two wagons to go abreast, and leading straight to the lick.”11 Tennessee historian and lawyer Edward Albright wrote later in the late nineteenth century, “To the licks in the region … came at regular intervals the animals from all over a large territory, and these in their journeys to and fro formed beaten paths or trails, all centering in this locality like the spokes of a wheel … all traces led to central licks … Hunters, both Indian and white, roaming at will through the forests came upon these narrow paths, and turning about threaded them together.”12
As a result of these and other accounts, names were bestowed on salt licks to identify their locations: French Lick, Big Lick, Licking Creek, White Lick, Big Bone Lick, Lower Blue Lick, Drennan's Lick, Knob Lick, May's Lick. The network of buffalo traces, connected by mineral salt licks, was the American heartland's first super-highway system. It provided a reliable web of terrestrial arteries that guided many of the bands of eastern colonists who yearned for the wider spaces, more fertile lands, and more abundant hunting grounds that lay west of the Appalachian Mountains. Some traces were busier than others, due mostly to their advantageous crossings at significant rivers and streams or their proximity to major salt deposits. As homesteaders with building and farming skills followed the explorers and surveyors in the last quarter of the 1700s, villages, merchant outposts, inns, and way stations mushroomed along traces in northern Kentucky, northern Tennessee, southern Ohio, and southern Indiana.
In 1968, John A. Jakle, assistant professor of geography at the University of Illinois, composed a comprehensive paper, titled The American Bison and The Human Occupance of the Ohio Valley.13 One passage from Mr. Jakle's document is particularly pertinent to this book, as it reads, “The Atlanant-o-wamiowee crossed into Kentucky at the mouth of the Licking River, proceeded south to Big Bone and Drennon's Licks, cut east to the Great Buffalo Crossing at present-day Frankfort, and continued via Lower Blue and May's Licks to the Limestone Crossing.” In the complex Shawnee language, an offshoot of the Central Algonquin tongue, Atlanant-o-wamiowee means “the buffalo trace.” But Mr. Jakle's most salient 10-word passage from his analysis is “… cut east to the Great Buffalo Crossing at present-day Frankfort …” Salient, for it is here at this place, the low trough of sandy bank and animal crossing on the Kentucky River, just a healthy stone's throw from what would become Frankfort, Kentucky, where the story of distilling in Kentucky's Bluegrass and Buffalo Trace Distillery starts.
The Unforgivable Extermination of Tatanka
In the pre-Columbian era, the robust North American buffalo population provided food from meat and vital organs, as well as shelter, clothing, weapons, tools, footwear, cord from hide and sinew, and fuel from dung for the native tribes that resided in the center of the continent. The nomadic Lakota, Pawnee, Kiowa, Osage, Blackfeet, Crow, Arapaho, Cherokee, Shawnee, Iroquois, Comanche, and many more tribes that followed the migrating herds of buffalo had a seemingly endless supply of basic sustenance. The native communities of the plains were, by and large, thoughtful in their relationship with the herds of tatanka, as the Lakota called the buffalo. For millennia, the tribes were aware that their own welfare and generational perpetuation depended almost entirely on their stewardship of the buffalo.
Everything changed for the worse starting in the late 1600s with the arrival of French, Spanish, and English hunters in North America's hinterlands. As weaponry evolved, the hunters' use of long-range, high-caliber Sharps, as well as Springfield and Remington No. 1 rifles, indiscriminately slaughtered buffalo for their hides, tongues, and horns, which were coveted in the eastern colonies and throughout Europe. Beginning around 1800, a cold-blooded, systematic extermination of buffalo conducted both by private citizens (often from the distant safety of trains or wagons) and the U.S. military brought the number of buffalo tumbling from tens of millions to less than 100 by 1883. This senseless, cold-blooded action stands as the largest case of mass murder of mammals over the span of one century in world history. The December 27, 1899, edition of the Morning Post North Carolina best summed up the genocidal crimes, saying, “One of the most extraordinary events that has characterized the last half of the present century is the extermination, the wiping out of the American bison … bones and pictures alone tell the story of a mighty race swept from the face of the earth by civilized people of the 19th century.”
Most evil of all, the U.S. government backed this act of premeditated mass annihilation to punish and cripple the Native American tribal societies, instigating, along with the intentional spread of viral diseases like smallpox, the downfall of the indigenous communities that once thrived from southern Canada to northern Mexico on land they viewed as sacred. A century and a half later, the pain of the native population continues on the squalid, poverty-stricken reservations scattered around the continent that are often located far from ancestral sites.
Meanwhile, dispersed among several states, the current buffalo population ranges from 500,000 to 600,000 head in the United States. Through the tireless efforts primarily of conservationists (Wildlife Conservation Society, National Bison Association) and the Native American community (InterTribal Buffalo Council), the U.S. Congress passed a bill, the National Bison Legacy Act, proclaiming the buffalo as the national mammal. The bill was made into law with the signature of President Barack Obama on May 9, 2016. Certainly, this institutional act is to be applauded, if tepidly. In light of the despicable mass slaughter that bathed the American prairies in the blood of the nation's most celebrated four-legged mammal, it seems like cold comfort indeed.
Notes
1 1 John R. Kennedy. “Salt Licks.” In Encyclopedia of North Carolina. The University of North Carolina Press, 2006.
2 2 Clarence W. Alvord and Lee Bidgood. The First Explorations of the Trans-Allegheny Region by the Virginians, 1650–1674, Cleveland, OH: The Arthur H. Clark Company, 1912, pp. 209–226.
3 3 R. P. Stephen Davis, Jr. (ed.). “The Travels of James Needham and Gabriel Arthur through Virginia, North Carolina and Beyond, 1673–1674,” Southern Indian Studies 39 (October 1990): 31–55.
4 4 Alan Vance Briceland. Westward from Virginia: The Exploration of the Virginia-Carolina Frontier 1650–1710. University of Virginia Press, 1987.
5 5 The Courier Journal of Louisville. “Kentucky Pioneers: The McAfees Among The Distinguished Men Who First Settle the State: How They Came to the Dark and Bloody Ground and Their Later Adventures.” September 9, 1888.
6 6 Williard R. Jillson. Pioneer Kentucky. State Journal Company, 1934, p. 12.
7 7 John Filson. The Discovery, Settlement and Present State of Kentucke. Wilmington, DE: Printed by James Adams, 1784.
8 8 William Clark. Journals of the Lewis and Clark
