Shawnee Springs
For the Shawnee Indians, Kentucky's broad valleys, lush meadows, and forested hills were an ideal home and hunting territory. Game that came to the streams and to Kentucky's salt licks assured the Shawnee of food in abundance. Consequently, they were reluctant to abandon Kentucky in response to settlement by the white settlers. Before the arrival of the settlers, the Shawnee subsisted in an economy that combined farming and hunting, but they soon became dependent on the fur trade as the flow of manufactured goods reached them after 1650. Driven from Kentucky in the 1670s by the Iroquois fur wars, the Shawnee began a migration to Pennsylvania, but began a return to Kentucky during the middle of the eighteenth century. Denied their claims to Kentucky by both the Iroquois in the 1768 Treaty of Fort Stanwix and by the Cherokee negotiations with North Carolina land speculators in 1775, the Shawnee nevertheless tried to stand their ground.
The Shawnee, who struggled with the Kentucky settlers more than any other tribe, probably numbered no more than three or four thousand by 1750. In 1774, the Shawnee began a struggle to stop westward expansion in a frontier conflict known as Lord Dunmore's War. The war did not last long and ended with the Battle of Point Pleasant on October 10, 1774. However, the Shawnee constituted a formidable threat to the whites in Kentucky until 1795, some 25 years later.
In 1750 the Northwest Territory, or the land west of the Appalachian Mountains, was the land of tomorrow for English and colonial American speculative Land Companies. In April of that year the Loyal Land Company of Virginia sent Dr. Thomas Walker west to spy out the land and to establish tomahawk claims to it. That party opened the great gateway, the Cumberland Gap, and the time was rapidly approaching when long hunters and settlers would enter the Bluegrass Region.
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