the Dakotas. Lincoln: University of Nebraska–Lincoln, 1993.9 9 George Imlay. A Topographical Description of the Western Territory of North America, Volume II. London, England: J. Debrett, Piccadilly, 1793.
10 10 John A. Jakle. Salt on the Ohio Valley Frontier, 1770–1820. University of Illinois, Urbana, p. 691.
11 11 Ibid.
12 12 Edward Albright. Early History of Middle Tennessee. Nashville, TN: Brandon Printing Company, 1908, p. 18.
13 13 John A. Jakle, The American Bison and The Human Occupance of the Ohio Valley. Urbana: University of Illinois, pp. 299–305.
2 “This Map of Kentucke: Drawn from Actual Observations …”
LEWIS EVANS OF Philadelphia was an educated man and an industrious science-minded contemporary of another commendable eighteenth-century Philadelphian, Benjamin Franklin. While Franklin applied his prodigious intellect to understanding nature, studying the frailties and strengths of humankind, and to defining how a democratic republic should function, Evans, lauded by the authors of Degrees of Latitude: Mapping Colonial America Margaret Beck Pritchard and Henry G. Taliaferro as “the best geographer working in the English colonies,”1 mapped in remarkable detail the uncharted region directly to the west of the 13 established colonies. Evans's initial effort, a meticulously drawn map completed in 1755, depicted numerous firsthand observations that helped guide Euro-American explorers for decades afterward. Notations, such as the positions of Native American encampments and pioneer settlements, the navigability of rivers, limestone deposits and shelves, salt licks, the locations of hills, worn pathways, traces and roads, coal deposits, and suggested portages, were drawn with clarity and precision.
In a later, even more comprehensive version, dated 1776, Evans shows the “Kentucke” River adjacent to entries such as “A Chain of small broken hills” and “Elephants Bones found here.” Evans's “elephant bones” mention, it should be noted, refers to unearthed mammoth tusks. This map shows the Kentucke River joining the Ohio River to the northwest. Evans's 1776 map remains the first known cartographical citing of the Kentucke River, on which much notable distilling history would later be made.
It is worth noting now that the official spelling of Kentucky with a “y” came later, around the time the territory gained statehood in 1792. Early variations on the term include Kentucke, Kaintuckee, and Cantuckey. The original name is thought to have been possibly derived from one of the Native American descriptors for the region, such as kan-tah-the from the Wyandotte nation or kin-athiki from the Algonquin tribe.
Mentioned previously in Chapter 1, John Filson was another Kentucky surveyor, journalist, and cartographer of distinction. Filson, who originally hailed from Lancaster, Pennsylvania, supplied yet another finely fashioned map of Kentucky, but years later in 1784, immediately after the conclusion of American Revolutionary War hostilities. The inscription at the top of Filson's map reads, with admirable politeness, “This map of Kentucke: drawn from actual observations, is inscribed with the most perfect respect, to the honorable congress of the United States of America, and to his Excell'cy George Washington, late commander in chief of their army. By their humble servant, John Filson. 1784.”2
Filson's outstanding mapmaking effort had a tight, pinpoint scale of 10 miles to an inch, making it easily readable for anyone hankering to make the weeks'-long journey from the eastern colonies. Filson himself established roots near the settlement of Lexington in approximately 1782 after purchasing a sizeable parcel of land. His anecdotal book, published like his map in 1784, was titled The Discovery, Settlement and Present State of Kentucke. It sold for $1.50 and enjoyed but a single pressing that numbered 1,500 copies.
John Filson's 1784 map of Kentucky.
Library of Congress
Tragically, John Filson vanished in October of 1788 while on a surveying mission in the remote woodlands of southern Ohio. The enduring story is that after Filson's group happened upon a small Shawnee hunting camp, a heated dispute ensued among the members of his party as to how to approach the tribe, either peacefully or with muskets blazing. The disagreement proved so vehement that it splintered the group into smaller factions. In what can only be considered a lapse of sound judgment, the frustrated Filson wandered off on his own into the depths of the forest to continue his surveying mission. Like so many men and women of his time, John Filson was never heard from again and his body was never found.3
Adventurers from the New England colonies tended to explore the virgin region north of the Ohio River, the expansive Great Lakes area of present-day Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Michigan, and Wisconsin, termed the Northwest Territory. By contrast, Evans, Filson, and other surveyors from Virginia and North Carolina colonies, most prominently, John Floyd, James Douglas, William Preston, and Isaac Hite, served generations of travelers by furnishing the logistical tools via their cartographic and journalistic data for the inevitable settlement of northern Kentucky. Small wonder, then, that after the signing of the Treaty of Fort Stanwix in October 1768 between Great Britain and the Six Nations of the Iroquois Confederation, relinquishing what is now much of Kentucky to the British Crown, settlers in Virginia Colony began packing their wagons, oxen, packhorses, and mules. This fateful treaty, signed by Sir William Johnson and the Iroquois chiefs, gave license to colonists to venture, at least theoretically, unfettered into the far western sections of Pennsylvania, New York, and Virginia. The treaty's contents included western Virginia's Fincastle County, in what is now most of Kentucky. One of the Fort Stanwix treaty's glaring shortcomings, however, included the exclusion from the agreement of the Shawnee and Cherokee nations, two important non-Iroquois tribes of approximately 4,000 and 10,000 people, respectively. This omission would, in part, be the cause of fatal trouble down the road. From 1750 to 1785, thousands of colonial travelers trudged westward across Pennsylvania Colony to faraway Fort Pitt, original site of the city of Pittsburgh. Built by the British from 1759 to 1761 during the French and Indian War at the confluence of the Monongahela and Alleghany rivers, Fort Pitt proved to be the ideal launching point onto the frontier's west-southwest leading aquatic superhighway, the Ohio River.
Other seekers for adventure, riches, and new horizons, including Daniel Boone and his comrades, walked, rode a mule or horse, or drove bumpy, two-wheel buckboards through the Cumberland Gap, a naturally formed V-shaped passage sliced through the Appalachian Mountains. The renowned Cumberland Gap is located near what today is the state border between Virginia to the east and Kentucky to the northwest. Many male pilgrims journeyed west in the late 1760s and early 1770s via the Gap to find the parcels of land granted to them via the Royal Proclamation of October 7, 1763, by the final Royal Governor of Virginia Colony, John Murray, fourth Earl of Dunmore. The land grants, from a total of 172,850 acres of available land, were payment for their military service to the British Crown during the French and Indian War (1754–1763). Such land-as-compensation arrangements were commonplace at the time, due primarily to the colonial government's inability to pay soldiers in currency for
