In the second half of the eighteenth century, the population of the American nation doubled every 20 years or so. And people were on the move as never before. Kentucky was a vital component of this migration from the eastern seaboard, almost octupling in population within three decades.
In the last two decades of the eighteenth century, tens of thousands of pioneers --white and the enslaved of African descent --ventured overland, through the Alleghenies, into frontier Kentucky.
We can imagine the buffalo and Native Americans traversing the land before the first black and white settlers walked in.
Imagining his position from the vantage of Cumberland Gap, in the mountains between Virginia and Kentucky, the frontier historian Frederick Jackson Turner described the “procession of civilization, marching single file.” First comes “the buffalo following the trail to the salt springs, the Indian, the fur trader and hunter, the cattle raiser, the pioneer farmer --and the frontier has passed by.” 1
In the final years of the eighteenth century, this procession of civilization, after the buffalo and Indians, lingered for a cultural moment in Western Kentucky in a land that would be named Muhlenberg.
As alluded to by Turner, trails of buffalo (American bison), and Indians, who used both the trails and buffalo, crisscrossed Kentucky before the coming of settlers from the east. The buffalo were so common that early Kentucky explorer Simon Kenton witnessed as many as 1,500 at a single salt lick.
The first pioneer roads, including the vitally important Wilderness Road, the trail through Cumberland Gap, were originally buffalo trails, or “traces.” Pioneers (and Native Americans before them) followed these traces, because the buffalo, through centuries of efficient use, found the easiest gradients up and down slopes, and sometimes trampled trails as much as six feet deep. 2
Furthermore, over many years, buffalo herds formed broad, graded pathways down riverbanks. One of these “buffalo landings” was at Yellow Banks, now Owensboro, on the Ohio River --the initial impetus for the location of that settlement. Moreover, the intersections of buffalo traces sometimes became the locations of other early settlements, including those of Cincinnati, Frankfort, Lexington, and Louisville. 3
The same might be true for Greenville since two buffalo trails crossed near where in Greenville, today, stands the county courthouse. Some well-worn buffalo traces were still visible on the Muhlenbergian landscape, at least into the 1930s, when Agnes Harralson visited one. 4
The buffalo trace from Yellow Banks (Owensboro) passed in a southerly direction through Calhoun (formerly Rhoadsville), to Greenville, probably passing through where became the location of courthouse square, continuing to Russellville. 5
The cross-trail from the east came from Hartford, Ohio County, crossed Green River at Rockport, passed about two miles south of Central City and on to Greenville, and continued westward to Pond River, crossing just upstream of Harpe’s Hill. 6
One prime buffalo destination was the salt lick, of about 20 acres, that later became Conley’s Lake, near Rochester, just over the Butler County line. To the south, the barrens of Christian County provided the expansive grassland feeding grounds that periodically concentrated the herds.
In this seasonal and perennial migration of the herds, the territory that later became Muhlenberg lay between these buffalo destinations --the grasslands, the salt lick, and the great Ohio.
Thus the terrain that would become Muhlenberg lay in the middle, a land between. The top of Courthouse Hill in Greenville marks the spot. ________________________________________________________
Frederick Jackson Turner, The Frontier in American History (New York: Henry Holt, 1920), 12.
Robert W. Kingsolver, "Buffalo," in John E. Kleber, ed.-in-chief, The Kentucky Encyclopedia (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1992), 138.
Kingsolver, 138.
Agnes S. Harralson, 1981. Steamboats on the Green and the Colorful Men Who Operated Them (Berea, KY: Kentucke Imprints, 1981), 11; Otto A. Rothert, A History of Muhlenberg County (Louisville: John P. Morton & Co., 1913), 11-12, and fn. 1, 13.
Rothert, 12-13.
Rothert, 12-13.
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