The Shawnee, Cherokee, and the Myth of the Dark and Bloody Ground
Near Louisville, Kentucky
When white settlers crossed the Appalachians into Kentucky in the seventeen seventies, they described the land as empty. Sometimes they used the phrase "dark and bloody ground," a phrase they attributed to Native people who supposedly called the region a no-man's-land of perpetual warfare. The phrase justified settlement. The land was not being used, the story went, so it was available.
The archaeology does not support the story. Indigenous peoples had lived in Kentucky continuously for at least twelve thousand years. The Falls of the Ohio, this exact bend in the river, had been a gathering place and crossing point for that entire period. The Devonian fossil beds that make the Falls scientifically remarkable today were known to Indigenous people long before European contact. Petroglyphs, pottery, earthworks, and burial mounds across the state document continuous, sophisticated occupation.
What had changed by the time English-speaking settlers arrived, by many historians' accounts, was the aftermath of the Beaver Wars of the mid-seventeenth century. Conflicts between Iroquois confederacies and Great Lakes tribes had destabilized population patterns across a large area of the interior, depopulating some regions of permanent villages. Kentucky, which had been shared hunting territory between Shawnee bands to the north and Cherokee territory to the south, had fewer permanent settlements by the seventeen seventies than it had held a century before.
Settlers read that as emptiness and wrote it as invitation. The Shawnee, who hunted and camped extensively in Kentucky and had villages in the Ohio River watershed, understood it differently. So did the Cherokee, whose claims to hunting grounds extended well into the state.
The Louisville area is Shawnee, Cherokee, Osage, and Chickasaw land. No federally recognized tribe currently holds territory within Jefferson County. The land acknowledgment that would accurately describe this place has not yet been widely adopted by the institutions that stand on it.
