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 day, Gist wrote, “… at about 12 M. came to the Cuttaway [Kentucky] River; We were obliged to go up it about 1 m. to an island which was the shoalest place We coud find to cross at …”6 Gist's chronicled movements suggest that the crossing he describes might be at the very location, later to be called Leestown, that lay about one mile from present-day Frankfort and was a critical part of the famed ancient buffalo trail, referred to by the native tribes as “great buffalo trace.”
The Amazement, the Terror
Aside from the empty vastness and developmental potential of the western wilderness, one common impression communicated by the returning frontiersmen, especially the celebrated “longhunters” like Daniel and Squire Boone, Henry Skaggs, James Harrod, Isaac Bledsoe, Richard Callaway, and others involved their stirring firsthand accounts of the breathtaking numbers of big game creatures. Elk, whitetail deer, black bear, panther, beaver, bobcat, wolf, wolverine, wild boar, and bison reigned supreme in the frontier's dense woodlands, bogs, limestone outcroppings, plains, and meadows. Even allowing for the seasonal hunting by the regional tribes, big game populations of unimaginable sizes flourished in the region that now encompasses all or part of the heartland states of Kentucky, Tennessee, Ohio, Indiana, Michigan, and Illinois.
But of all the recorded accounts concerning big game, the most indelible impressions were spun courtesy of the horned, cocoa-brown-colored, and aggressive American bison. Zoology long ago determined that the two distinct varieties of buffalo in the greater Bovid family had for millennia been found solely in sub-Saharan Africa (the ornery and dangerous Cape buffalo) and southeastern Asia (the water buffalo), and not in North America until relatively recently. Buffalo and bison are related but biologically different. DNA findings from bones excavated in northern Canada suggest, however, that bison herds emigrated from eastern Asia anywhere from 195,000 to 130,000 years ago, traveling over the natural Bering Straits land bridge that connected eastern Asia to Alaska. The buffalo cousins that made the journey, two Bovid families of bison, are divided between the American bison and the European bison. Nevertheless, the English- and French-speaking explorers of the western frontier from their initial seventeenth century portrayals referred to the American bison by a variety of names, including biffalo, bofelo, buffalow, bufflo, buffaloe, and, most commonly, buffalo. That latter sobriquet, though technically incorrect, has endured to the present day. In keeping with this quirky custom, I will refer to the American bison as buffalo moving forward.
In terms of individual size the North American buffalo is an imposing, sinewy yet compact biological machine. Females average from 700 to 1,000 pounds, stand five feet at the shoulder and are six to seven feet from nose to tail while males can tip the scales at 1,800 to 2,000 pounds, stand six feet at the shoulder and span up to nine feet in length. In their innate “fight or flight” genetic programming, the slightest disturbance while they are at rest or grazing can, in an instant, set an entire herd into unpredictable, helter-skelter motion from zero to 30 miles per hour. This hair-trigger reflex is why Native American hunters, who regarded the buffalo as a sacred being, used so much caution, stealth, and concealing costumes when in the hunt. Their elaborate precautions taught the Euro-American longhunters and their successors about the necessity for extreme safeguard measures when dealing with the skittish buffaloes.
The Euro-American explorers encountered buffalo not only in small groups of 20 to 50 but also in vast herds in the tens of thousands, stretching across middle America's fertile prairies, which were carpeted with swaying short and tall grasses. The largest reported gatherings ranged from 100 to 500,000 buffalo. As the massive herds of buffalo trotted in migration mode, the ground underfoot quaked in rolling temblors and the air hummed with the sound of hooved thunder and guttural murmurs. The pong of hide, urine, and dung stung the eyes and clouds of billowing dust clogged the nostrils. Witnessing wild buffalo searching for sustenance in such staggering numbers proved such an awe-inspiring spectacle that it inspired the more literate early adventurers to connect pen to notebook. “The amazing herds of buffaloes, which resort thither, by their size and number, fill the traveller with amazement and terrors, especially when he beholds the prodigious roads they have made from all quarters as if leading to some populous city,” described Kentucky surveyor, mapmaker, historian, and pioneer John Filson in 1784.7 Twenty-one years later on August 29, 1806, William Clark wrote in the journal of his historic expedition to the Pacific Ocean with Meriwether Lewis about the spectacle of the buffalo population, estimated then to be in the range of at least 30 million, and by some estimates possibly 60 million, across the continent. Of the wonder he felt, Clark wrote, “I assended to the high Country and from an eminance I had a view of the plains for a great distance. From this eminance I had a view of a greater number of buffalow than I had ever Seen before at one time. I must have Seen near 20,000 of those animals feeding on this plain.”8
The buffalo herds were perpetually in motion. They thrived by grazing on the nutrient-rich, flat-as-a-tabletop, grassy plains, and sheltered in woodland regions that spanned from northwestern Canada south through the heartland prairies to northern Mexico, as well as southeast to the hardwood forests of the Appalachian mountain chain. The immense range that sustained the buffalo population covered more than one-third of the North American continent in the late 1500s. Buffalo roamed unchallenged throughout this vast tract of North America, trampling and sculpting the terrain and flora by the sheer enormity of their numbers and the incessant pounding of millions of hooves. Their seasonal migrations traveled along ancient pathways that had been carved into the landscape over millennia. Many of the buffalo trails, or traces, were in some locations hundreds of feet wide and up to four feet deep. Their battered traces in which the dirt was pulverized to an almost stone-like hardness were connected, like the blue highways on a present-day roadmap, by specific locations and topographical intersections that provided natural mineral deposits, such as sulfur, magnesium, calcium,