Blue Licks Battlefield

You are standing on the field of Blue Licks, where one of the last battles of the Revolutionary War was fought on August nineteenth, seventeen eighty-two. That was nearly a year after Cornwallis surrendered at Yorktown, but the war never really ended out here on the frontier.

A force of British rangers and several hundred Native warriors lured a band of Kentucky militiamen across the Licking River. Daniel Boone, serving as a lieutenant colonel, read the signs and warned that it was an ambush. The hot-headed men charged anyway. Within minutes the trap closed. More than sixty Kentuckians were killed, among them Boone's own son Israel.

Historians call it the low point for Americans in the long fight for the lands beyond the Appalachians. Today this quiet state park preserves the ground where that bloody lesson was learned.