of a community-oriented society and the conclusion, at least in part, of nomadic lifestyles. The intersecting river system of the Bluegrass provided convenient highways by bark canoe or dugout that promoted inter-tribal trade and the movement between the Shawnee, Cherokee, Chickasaw, Wyandot, Delaware, Mosopelea, and Yuchi hunting camps.
Once the Americas were pried open by the voyages of Christopher Columbus in the 1490s, European monarchs rushed to gain footholds in the exotic continents to the west for the express purposes of mining their untapped natural resources, in particular, gold, silver, and beaver furs, and to claim territory for the expansion of their kingdoms. Spain and Portugal were especially active in exploration throughout the sixteenth century. Their aggressive exploits caused deep concern in the courts of their main commercial and military rivals, England and France.
Then, in 1607, a century prior to the formation of the Kingdom of Great Britain, three vessels sailing under the flag of England landed at what is now coastal Virginia. They were members of the chartered Virginia Company. Their mission was to create a colony, to be christened Jamestown, in North America for the English monarch King James I. Jamestown's harrowing struggles with famine, disease, and bitter clashes with the Algonquin tribe are widely known.
In 1609, James I proclaimed the vast expanse of lands northwest and west of Virginia, that included the area that would later become Kentucky, as the property of the royal colony. With that event as well as earlier incursions by the French and Spanish, the days of the eastern native tribes' reign became numbered. In the latter half of the seventeenth century, initial forays from Spanish and French Jesuit priests, trappers, and explorers like Robert de la Salle, Jacques Marquette, and Louis Jolliet deep into the North American heartland had already taken place. From 1650 to 1675, expeditions led by Euro-American colonists from Virginia and North Carolina traveling as far west as the Mississippi River passed through northern Kentucky, provoking the native tribes.
A remarkably vivid letter written on August 22, 1674 at Fort Henry in colonial Virginia by fur trader Colonel Abraham Wood to London-based investor John Richards described in startling detail the expeditions of two explorers, James Needham and Gabriel Arthur, Wood's servant.2 Ten jam-packed pages of derring-do chronicle their exploits over the course of two years, depicting with aching clarity the severity of the trials posed by such ventures of the period. Colonel Wood in April 1673 commissioned Needham and Arthur to venture into the wild regions west of the Virginia and Carolina colonies in order to reach a trade agreement with the Cherokee tribe. The letter addresses how the men “… killd many swine, sturgin [sturgeon] and beavers and barbecued them …” It spoke of Needham and Arthur's numerous tense encounters with the suspicious native tribes. In one intriguing passage, Wood speaks of how “This river runes north west and out of ye westerly side it goeth another great river about a days journey lower where the inhabitance are an inumarable company of Indians …” It is clear from the report that Needham and Arthur's travels covered a wide range of territory that lay directly to the west of the Virginia and North Carolina colonies. The language suggests that their journeys might well have included northern Kentucky, where two rivers, the Kentucky and the Licking, run in a northwesterly direction.
James Needham unfortunately came to a horrific end at the hands of a tribal warrior and guide called Occhonechee Indian John, “… a fatt thick bluff faced fellow …” who reportedly first shot Needham “… neare ye burr of ye eare …” after a heated, day-long disagreement. He then hacked open Needham's chest with a tomahawk, ripped out his heart, and held it aloft for all his companions to see. Wood's account of James Needham's death reported, “… ye Tomahittans started to rescue Needham but Indian John was too quick for them, soe died the heroyick English man.”
Arthur barely survived the violence, ending up first as a captive but later as a trusted companion of the tribal chief of the native band referred to by Wood as Tomahittans, more commonly known as Cherokees. After being wounded in the arm from an arrow, taking part in war party raids on Spanish settlements in Florida, and marrying a Tomahittan woman named Hannah Rebecca Nikitie, Gabriel Arthur eventually returned to Fort Henry on June 18, 1674, after roving back and forth through what is now Kentucky, Alabama, Georgia, Florida, and Tennessee over the course of nearly two nerve-racking years. Abraham Wood's commercial ambitions in the frontier ceased with James Needham's demise and Gabriel Arthur's final return.3
Yet even facing such horrors, exploratory penetrations into the western frontier continued unabated and were often underwritten by companies like the Ohio Company of Virginia, the Illinois and Wabash Land Company, and the Ohio Land Company.4 The explorers, surveyors, traders, trappers, blacksmiths, carpenters, and hunters of the pre–American Revolutionary War period who journeyed westward over the crags of the Blue Ridge and Appalachian mountain chains to trek into the inhospitable environs of the Ohio River Valley were intrepid, rugged, and determined individuals. A substantial number of the adventurers who ventured into this desolate region in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries were never seen or heard from again. Others, either broken in spirit or maimed by bear claw or arrowhead or copperhead snake, returned chastened to the safety of the 13 Atlantic coast-hugging American colonies that were by the 1760s ruled by King George III, monarch of Great Britain. Their quests and dreams, as documented by volumes of existing accounts, often ended in defeat, ill health, or financial ruin. The taverns of Philadelphia, the beer halls of Boston, and the inns of Richmond served as the theatres in which the defeated travelers recounted their bedeviled wanderings. They spun bone-chilling tales of starvation, of lost fingers and toes to frostbite, of impenetrable forests, of lethal midnight attacks by panthers or feral pigs and, most frightening of all, their gruesome encounters with hunting and war parties of native tribes. Such was the misfortune for some after being subdued by the harsh rigors of the unforgiving western wilderness.
By stark contrast, the more successful returning wayfarers from the frontier came back to the colonies in triumph, brandishing bundles of animal pelts, the scars of hair-raising escapades, and unbridled hubris. With infectious gusto, they reported to mesmerized colonial audiences about a limitless, fertile, Garden of Eden–like paradise that, yes, tested any sane person's deepest inner resources and nerve, but likewise offered to those blessed with a surfeit of mettle the potential reward of witnessing virgin, uncharted lands on which to hunt and fish and perhaps, in time, to cultivate and settle. One later report carried by the Courier Journal of Louisville on September 9, 1888, that focused on the escapades of one family, the McAfee clan, stated, “The glowing description given of the country beyond the mountains, by Dr. [Thomas] Walker and other adventurous spirits, inspired the younger members of the [McAfee] family with enthusiasm and a burning desire to visit it and judge of its beauties for themselves.”5 The McAfee explorations would, as we shall see, prove to be of key importance to our story.
After a century (1670–1770) of steady immigration from Europe and the subsequent development of quiet hamlets into bustling towns, many mid-eighteenth-century citizens of the British Crown thought the King's most prized colonies had become too crowded and too overfarmed. In the minds of some colonists, the New World had become too much like the Old World of England, Scotland, Ireland, Wales, Holland, Sweden, Switzerland, or Germany, the places they had left behind. Though 90 percent of the colonists during that period were farmers, the desire of the restless and the disgruntled to push westward into the fabled region the British called “Indian Reserve” became a clarion call in churches, taverns, and meeting halls from the late 1690s into the first half of the 1700s.
By the 1750s and 1760s, the focus of further colonial exploration had turned to locating suitable regions for settlement. The lushness of the Bluegrass held particular attraction to the surveyors. One notable surveyor, Christopher Gist, wrote in 1751 with evident excitement as he approached the Kentucky River, “From the top of the Mountain we saw fine level country SW as far as our Eyes could behold, and it was a clear Day.” Of his movements the next
