Genealogy/Books/Kentucky/Klotter 2018

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Chapter 1

British colonists also desired access to Kentucky, but at the end of the French and Indian War in 1763, the victorious King George III restricted colonists from wandering westward. By royal proclamation, he drew a boundary line along the ridge of the Appalachian Mountains past which they could not go. Yet the British could not enforce that restriction, and hunters from western Virginia, North Carolina, and Pennsylvania breached the Proclamation Line.

Because their hunting trips were often months long, the men who encroached upon Kentucky became known among historians as Long Hunters. They typically sneaked into Kentucky through a gap in the Appalachian Mountains. The Cumberland Gap was one of the more accessible and most famous routes. These hunters characteristically separated into parties of three to four hunters and scattered across an area to hunt and gather as many skins as they could transport back through the mountains. Hunters from Virginia and South Carolina slipped into Kentucky through the Cumberland Gap in 1766 and traveled northward, where they bumped into James Harrod and Michael Stoner, hunters from Pennsylvania who came down the Ohio River. The following year, James Findley of North Carolina returned from his hunting trip with tales of the grandeur and abundance of Kentucky’s game.

The Boone brothers, Stuart, and Neeley remained in Kentucky as the others returned to North Carolina. In early 1770, Stuart disappeared. This discouraged Neeley, who departed for home. A few months later, Squire Boone took the cache of skins back east, planning to return in the fall. In the meantime, Daniel stayed in Kentucky alone. He amused himself by reading Gulliver’s Travels, exploring the hunting grounds, and singing. When Caspar Mansker’s hunting party wandered into the Green River region, they were startled one day to hear a strange sound. They discovered Boone, lying on the ground, bellowing at the top of his lungs. Boone trav- eled northward across the Kentucky River into the Great Meadow of the Bluegrass region, then beyond the Licking River to the banks of the Ohio. He followed herds of bison along an impressively worn trail known as the Old Buf- falo Trace. This trail directed him to the Lower Blue Licks, where he found hundreds of bison meandering around the salt licks. He went southward again, following the Kentucky River, where he stood on bluffs overlooking the wilderness. The adventures of Daniel Boone in these solitary interludes made him an expert on Kentucky’s geography and fauna. He also became well aware of its dangers.

Such episodes reveal growing strains with- in Native American nations, particularly among the Shawnees, about how to deal with British colonists who trespassed into Kentucky. The Maquachake clan, led by Nonhelema’s brother Hokolewskwa, was determined to live in peace, while somehow sustaining Shawnee control over the hunting grounds. But events worked against Hokolewskwa. At the Treaty of Fort Stanwix in 1768, the Haudenosaunees surrendered their claim to sovereignty over the Ohio River valley. With this treaty, they betrayed the Shawnees and led British colonists to assume that the region was available for settlement. John Murray, the fourth Earl of Dunmore and the new governor of Virginia, pushed Shaw- nee chiefs to sign over lands along the upper Ohio River, which angered more Shawnee warriors who resented the loss of hunting grounds. As Long Hunters escalated their raids on Kentucky, Hokolewskwa and other peace chiefs found it increasingly difficult to withstand fellow Shawnees’ calls for war.

Chapter 2

Lord Dinwiddie intended expeditions against French encroachment in the Ohio River valley to protect British economic interests. Mercantilism demanded that any economic and imperial competitors be eliminated, and the French and the British had fought three previous wars in North America toward that end: King William’s War (1688–1697), Queen Anne’s War (1702–1713), and King George’s War (1744– 1748). When the British won the French and Indian War, they finally succeeded in eliminating the main threat to their extraction of North America’s raw goods. Even with the Proclamation Line of 1763, they did little to restrict colonial Long Hunters because the skin trade contributed to the empire’s larger economic needs.

In the 1770s, however, another form of colonialism in Kentucky replaced extractive colonialism. The wars of the 1770s and 1780s — Lord Dunmore’s War (1774–1775), the American Revolutionary War (1775–1783), and the Cherokee-American War (1776–1794) — were fought in part to facilitate colonial expansion. Whereas natural and human resources are the motivation behind extractive colonialism, land provides the primary motivation for settler colonialism, a system in which settlers move onto native lands in order to create a new homeland.