Settled by the English in , South Carolina became the eighth state to ratify the U. Live TV. This Day In History. History Vault. How the Troubles Began in Northern Ireland. A Speedy History of the Kentucky Derby. Alaska Becomes 49th State. The Alcan Highway. Deconstructing History: Empire State Building. Virginia One of the 13 original colonies, Virginia was the first part of the country permanently settled by the English, who established Jamestown on the banks of the James River in Maryland One of the original 13 colonies, Maryland lies at the center of the Eastern Seaboard, amid the great commercial and population complex that stretches from Maine to Virginia.
Maine Maine, the largest of the six New England states, lies at the northeastern corner of the country. Although he was never seen again, the Cherokee believe that the songs of Yahula and the tinkling bells of his horses can still be heard at night near the running water of Yahoo Falls located in the Big South Fork National River and Recreation Area, McCreary County, Kentucky.
On the Trail of Tears, the story of Yahula was used to urge the people forward to Oklahoma, suggesting that Yahula has gone there and we will hear him, but they never did. The story of Yahula is hauntingly similar to the story of Jacob Troxell and the massacre of Yahoo Falls. Jacob Troxell, born in , was the son of a Jewish immigrant from Switzerland and his mother was Delaware.
In February , word reached Washington that British forces had abandoned the old French Post Vincennes in present day Indiana, and it was in the hands of American militia. Tukaho invited Jacob Troxell to his village, Tsalachi, which was located near present-day Burnside, Kentucky.
During the winter of , Tory infantry from Watauga, under the command of Major Patrick Ferguson, British Commander of the 71st regiment, were robbing and killing Cherokee hunters as they traversed the Great Tellico Trail. He used the incident to explain why Doublehead and his warriors should support Washington and the colonial army. Jacob Troxell successfully completed his mission. By this time, Cherokee living in the Cumberland River valley were almost unrecognizable to the whites now settled in the area.
Jacob Troxell and his family, like other Cherokee, lived in a cabin, herded cattle, horses, and pigs, and used metal farming tools to tend crops of potatoes, native corn and beans, orchards of peach trees, and they kept bees for honey and wax for trade. By this time, Doublehead had built an estate near Muscle Shoals, Tennessee. His estate included twenty enslaved African Americans and at least one mixed blood, thirty head of cows, head of fine stock cattle, two stud horses, eight mares and geldings, and nine head of common horses, fifty head of sows, pigs and small stock hogs, and head of large hogs.
His home was furnished with four large beds with contemporary bedding and bedsteads, six dining room and twelve sitting chairs, dining room and kitchen tables, dishes and tableware, large and small iron cooking pots, a brass kettle and teapot, three large ovens, and three pair of iron fire dogs.
Without the protection of his powerful father, Tukaho Doublehead was powerless and vulnerable. His people were greatly reduced in number and dispirited from fighting off the advance of white settlers and smallpox. Although the Cherokee in the Cumberland River valley had made every possible concession to maintain peace with the United States, many of the European settlers were former Franklinites, followers of John Sevier.
In the late summer of , Blackburn agreed to offer protection and education to all Cherokee women and children from the Cumberland River valley. Fearing that she was not going to show up, some of the mothers gathered their children, shouldered their packs, and began to walk out of the shelter. A volley of gunfire erupted from the darkness in front of the falls. A local militiaman, Hiram Gregory, had learned of the gathering behind Yahoo Falls, enlisted a group of young vigilantes, and set out to exterminate the Cherokee from the Cumberland River valley once and for all.
Campfires illuminated the shelter leaving the Cherokee completely open and exposed—there was nowhere for them to run or hide. After it was all over, more than Cherokee lay dead or dying behind Yahoo Falls. Jacob Troxell was said to have lost his mind in grief. A mass grave was excavated in a high terrace behind the falls, the only place where the soil was deep enough to dig a trench. The bodies of the slain Cherokee men, women, and children were laid to rest until the grave was exposed during logging operations during the early twentieth century.
The exact date of this horrific event is unknown. Some say that the massacre occurred on the th anniversary of the Pueblo Revolt, August 10, and others have placed it in the fall, early October. Regardless of the exact day and month, all of the published documents and family histories agree that the massacre of Yahoo Falls took place in the latter half of the year There is a similar misunderstanding on the date and place of death of Big Jake Troxell.
Militia, Revolutionary War, January 18, , October 10, , family records indicate that he was taken to Alabama where he lived until If he suffered catatonic depression following the death of his Cherokee wife as reported, then he would have been considered a living dead man, a person whose body was alive, but his spirit had left him, a situation not unlike the trader in the story of Yahula. There is also great deal of confusion about the death of Doublehead.
Sir Alexander Cuming proclaimed him as King of his people. If Moytoy was a King, then his daughters must have been princesses. Doublehead was the son of Great Eagle, who was the son of Moytoy, and tribal leadership was passed down from father to son. Princess is the way eighteenth century British communicated the kin term daughter of a Chief. Secondly, the name Corn-blossom is not a Cherokee word. While Corn-tassel Utsidsata and Onidosita and Corn-silk Seluunenudi are Cherokee words that approximate Corn-blossom, they are masculine names.
Unfortunately, the gender of the offspring is unknown and was not born until about Cherokee census and enrollment records indicate that Doublehead had four daughters living with him at the time Tukaho brought Jacob Troxell to Tsalachi and they were all very close in age—Tuskiahoote, Saleechie, Nigodigeyu, and Gulustiyu respectively. Tuskiahoote and Saleechie were both reported as the wives of Colonel George Colbert, and Nigodigeyu and Gulustiyu were reported as the wives of Samuel Riley.
We can rule out Saleechie Doublehead because it is well documented that she survived the Trail of Tears and died in Indian Territory, Oklahoma in Tuskiahoote Doublehead is thought to have lived until , but we cannot rule her out because this date is by no means a certainty.
On January 31, , just months after the Yahoo Falls massacre, the former Cherokee land was granted for sale at the minimal price of ten cents an acre in order to encourage the development of iron and salt works.
During the first forty years of the 20th century, blight devastated the American chestnuts. Although the blight provided an economic boom to the local timber industry, logging operations deforested the shallow unstable soils around Yahoo Falls. Unprecedented erosion extended into the great sandstone rock shelter behind the falls and exposed a mass grave filled with human skeletal remains.
Grave robbers, artifact collectors, curiosity seekers, and gravity began to disperse bones down slope until it was impossible to walk into the shelter without stepping on them.
All that survives is an empty trench behind the falls, which approximates the size of the mass grave at Wounded Knee Memorial on the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota. In , Congress passed the Indian Removal Act, which ordered the removal of all American Indian tribes living in the east to lands west of the Mississippi River.
Although it was successfully challenged by the Cherokee Nation and declared unconstitutional by the United States Supreme Court, then President Andrew Jackson refused to recognize the decision. His refusal to enforce the court's verdict resulted in the expulsion of more than 16, Cherokee from their homes. The Cherokee were forced to move out of Kentucky on three routes, one by water and two by land.
On June 6, , a steamboat and barge made its way from Ross's Landing on the Tennessee River, today known as Chattanooga, Tennessee, through western Kentucky to the Ohio River, on to the Mississippi and Arkansas rivers, and finally on into Oklahoma.
Extreme drought and disease resulted in many deaths, especially for the children and elderly. The remaining Cherokees traveled out of Kentucky overland on dirt roads in multiple detachments, upwards of 1, each.
A combination of insect filled flour and corn, tainted meat, lung ailments, and drought made travel through the state extremely difficult and resulted in the death of an untold number of Cherokee. The exact death toll is impossible to calculate, but it clearly was in the thousands.
Some of the Cherokee on the Trail of Tears escaped and secretly joined their extended families in Clay County. Since then, Cherokee families living in Kentucky have been subjected to ethnocide.
Ironically, outside of their reserve lands in North Carolina and Oklahoma, there are more people of Cherokee descent living in Kentucky than any other state. It includes a park in Hopkinsville, Kentucky, which is one of the few documented campsites used on the Trail of Tears.
In , the National Park Service certified the campsites used between and as part of the National Historic Trail of Tears, the only non-federally owned property with this title. Of particular significance, the Hopkinsville, Kentucky park includes the graves of Fly Smith and Whitepath, Cherokee Chiefs who died during the removal. Historically, the Piqua, also spelled Pekowi and Pekowitha, was a division of the Shawnee.
Some Shawnee have also translated Piqua as the dusty feet people. The Piqua were known as the second oldest brother of the five brothers or bands of the Shawnee. They were also known as the talking band because they arranged for the speakers for the Principal Chief. In , colonial troops fought the Piqua Shawnee under the leadership of Cornstalk in the battle known as Point Pleasant, West Virginia. With the death of Cornstalk, they, like the Cherokee, became split in their support of the American Revolution.
By , most of their towns in Kentucky such as Eskippakithiki, today known as Indian Old Fields in Clark County, had been repeatedly destroyed by the American army. Archaeologically, this site is known as the Fort Ancient Madisonville site. In addition to European trade goods and French gunflints, radiocarbon dating demonstrate that the site was indeed occupied at that time by the Shawnee.
Interestingly, the Madisonville site also produced numerous copper pendants and engraved bone artifacts as well as what may be one of the largest serpentine-shaped earthworks ever discovered. The importance of the snake symbol is illustrated by the fact it was often used as a tribal sign on eighteenth century Shawnee treaties. It is quite possible that the earthwork represents a marker for Manato, the snake clan, and the Madisonville site may have been a Shawnee Snake Town.
Fort Ancient livelihood combined farming, hunting, and gathering. Domesticated plants such as beans, gourds, maize, squash, and sunflower were grown, and their diet was supplemented with small game hunting and wild plant gathering.
Fort Ancient agricultural land was well-planned and maintained with staggered planting to reduce the risk of crop failure. They stored their agricultural produce in abundant voluminous bell-shaped storage pits, which allowed them to seasonally leave their villages to make salt and hunt game such as bear, bison, deer, elk, and turkey at places such as Big Bone Lick, Kentucky.
Recent DNA studies suggest that the ancestry of the Piqua Shawnee may extend even further back in time. This finding may be related to the initial movement of Shawnee into the North. Oral histories and traditional ways of life were passed down generation after generation from those who escaped the forced removal during the s. Today, the Piqua Shawnee are the only recognized tribe in Kentucky. However, most American Indians in Kentucky were not considered citizens until Before then, some American Indians living in Kentucky acquired citizenship by marrying Euroamerican men or through military service.
Most American Indians living in Kentucky were barred from citizenship until the Indian Citizenship Act was passed. It also provided funding to establish a State Historic Preservation Officer SHPO and staff to conduct surveys, undertake comprehensive preservation planning, and establish standards for programs in each state.
The NHPA also required all states to establish a mechanism for certifying local governments to participate in the National Register nomination and funding programs. One of the directives of the KHC is to identify, preserve, and protect all meaningful American Indian cultural resources in the state.
The KHC subsequently focused its efforts on the documentation and preservation of vestiges of American Indian artistic and cultural resources from hundreds and even thousands of years ago.
Contemporary American Indians, tribes, and organizations in the state were essentially ignored because they were not included in the original composition of the NHPA. Not only does the AIRFA protect and preserve the inherent right of all American Indians and tribes to believe, express, and exercise traditional religions and use items of artistic and material culture that are considered sacred, it also provides American Indians with unlimited access to sacred sites, including those in Kentucky that are listed on the National Register of Historic Places.
Unfortunately, these sites also attracted the attention of grave robbers and plunderers for profit. In , the repugnantly large-scale pillaging of an American Indian cemetery near Uniontown, Kentucky brought international attention to the American Indian people, tribes, and organizations in the Commonwealth when they spoke out against the desecration.
The outcome was a positive change in laws concerning the protection, preservation, and conservation of these sacred places. NAGPRA provides a process for the return of human remains, funerary objects, sacred objects, and objects of cultural patrimony to Indigenous lineal descendants and culturally affiliated tribes. By , the NHPA had been amended many times to include American Indians, tribes, and organizations in partnership with State and Federal government to provide leadership in the preservation of cultural resources.
The amendments were specifically made to assist American Indians in the expansion and acceleration of historic preservation programs and activities. These activities include the identification, evaluation, protection, and interpretation of historic properties. The new amendments to the NHPA allow cultural items and properties of traditional religious and cultural importance to American Indians, tribes, and organizations to be protected and eligible for inclusion on the NRHP.
The amendments to NHPA made it essential that all preservation-related activities, including planning, are carried out in consultation with Indigenous people, tribes, and organizations. Its mission is to bring respect and recognition to the individual sovereignty of Tribal Nations and states.
The GIIC also supports the preservation of traditional American Indian culture, language, and values, and to encourage socioeconomic development aimed at tribal self-sufficiency. House Bill was written by Reginald Meeks and passed by both houses.
State Botanical Garden. State Bourbon Festival. State Butterfly. State Capital. State Covered Bridge. State Dance. State Drink. State Fish. State Flag. State Flower. State Fossil. State Fruit. State Gemstone. State Gun. State Honey Festival.
0コメント