Kentucky’s Long Hunters: Pelts, Profits, and the Push for Westward Expansion
The long rifle is synonymous with a group of white Kentucky settlers known as the Long Hunters. The most notable was Daniel Boone, but many others belonged to this group.
Long Hunters, named because they would leave their families and homes for several months, long travels, and return to sell pelts on the markets.
Collaborative lists of Long Hunters traveling into Kentucky include Elisha Walden, William and John Blevin, Charles Cox, William Pittman, John Stuart, John Finley, Benjamin Cutbirth, Captain James Smith, Hancock Taylor, Abraham Haptonstall, Henry, Charles, and Richard Skaggs, Anthony Bledsoe, and others.
The Long Hunters were not the first Europeans in Kentucky.
Figure 1 A Map of the British Empire in America with the French and Spanish Settlements Adjacent Thereto, Library of Congress.
Henry Popple, a French cartographer, created one of the more accurate maps of the mid-eighteenth century published in 1735.1
Historian Lewis Collins documented annals that presented important events to the history of Kentucky, which included a party led by Dr. Thomas Walker into the region in 1750.2
Walker and his associates were hired by the Loyal Land Company, based in Virginia, to explore westward into present-day Kentucky. There, they made their way through “Cave Gap”, which was renamed the Cumberland Gap by Walker.3
Walker’s group is the first identified group to enter Kentucky in 1750, and was used exclusively for hunters throughout the following ten to twenty years.4
Walker’s party of six also found evidence that they were not the first Europeans to have entered that area. They found signs of the cross and names carved into trees. Reportedly, Walker added his name to the list.5
The Loyal Land Company was contracted by the British-American Ohio Company to create a zone to prevent the possible expansion of the French. The French had been sending explorers up through the Mississippi River from the port of New Orleans to the Great Lakes. They even followed the Ohio River, where Popple took recordings for his maps.
In the two-decade period between Walker and the first surveying expeditions in 1773, some groups would enter the Cumberlands to hunt for sustenance and furs for trade.
The gap was not the only way into Kentucky; the Ohio River was another route. John Finley and Daniel Boone used the river to conduct trade deals with Native Americans throughout the northern and middle regions of Kentucky as early as 1767 and 1769.
No matter who was first to enter Kentucky, it is the intentions of the Long Hunters that are the most relevant to the first explorations of the western wilderness.
Figure 2: Beaver skin top hat, possibly belonging to Col. E.H. Taylor. Beaver skin was popular outer wear for clothing with form due to the water-resistant nature of the skins.
The men were first looking to make a profit through pelts. The pelts of buffalo, deer, and beaver were highly sought after, for their toughness, their many textile uses, and, especially beaver pelts, for their water-resistance.
The Proclamation of 1763, a law enacted by King George III after the Seven Years' Wars, restricted westward expansion past the Appalachians. Enforcement of that law was difficult, and small hunting parties from the western parts of Virginia, North Carolina, and southern Pennsylvania would cross that line for profits.6
Long Hunters preferred to use the Pennsylvania long-rifle, a flint lock long-barreled rifle that required black powder, a packing wad, and a lead bullet.
Figure 3: Flint mechanism of a Pennsylvania long rifle, Kentucky Historical Society.
The hunts crossed into the main hunting grounds of two Native American groups: the Shawnee and the Cherokee. The Shawnee hunting grounds were the larger tracts of central and northern Kentucky, and hunters using the Ohio River would usually encounter them. The Cherokee’s hunting ground was located closer to the Cumberland Gap area.
Long Hunters were also involved in trade with the Shawnee and Cherokee and while there was some violence, the Native Americans were more likely to confiscate the supplies of the Euro-American hunters and leave them with enough to return home.
For example, a group of Shawnee, with Captain Will Emery, an ally of the Shawnee and Cherokee, ran into Boone and John Stuart, and the hundreds of deer, elk, and buffalo skins Boone and Stuart had collected throughout six months. Emery told them, “Now, brothers, go home and stay there. Don’t come here anymore, for this is the Indians’ hunting ground, and all the animal skins and furs are ours. And if you are foolish as to venture here again, you may be sure the wasps and yellowjackets will sting you severely.”7
This conflict between Emery and Boone was well documented, mostly due to Boone’s fame across the frontier. This was a regular occurrence throughout the Kentucky hunting lands.
Long Hunters were captured by Cherokee leader Captain Dick, who, after one of the hunters recognized him and praised him, named a river after him, Dick’s River, which changed over time to the present Dix River.
Captain Dick appreciated the sentiment and showed them an area of good hunting grounds but also sternly warned them, “kill it and go home”.8
The Shawnee and the Cherokee’s frustrations grew over time as the hunters pushed further into the interior of Kentucky to sustain the fur trading. Overhunting of game and the mass fields of decaying, skinless bison and deer inflamed tensions between Native American groups and the Long Hunters.
A creek bed in an overhunted area developed the name Stinking Creek due to the stench of the carcasses in the shallow waters and along its banks.9
Mounting tensions between the hunters and the Cherokee and Shawnee nations made it harder for Indigenous leaders to maintain control over their people, who feared for their way of life.
In turn, Cherokee and Shawnee people increased their warnings and acts of violence as Euro-Americans continued to enter Kentucky to survey lands, build forts, and settlements. In 1775, Cherokee leader Dragging Canoe warned that Kentucky “would be dark and difficult to settle.” Dragging Canoe is the one credited with saying that Kentucky is a “dark and bloody ground”.10
Dragging Canoe’s words would be misinterpreted due to differences in culture between the Native American groups and the Long Hunters from Virginia, North Carolina, and Pennsylvania.
Although there were Native American settlements in the area, nations such as the Shawnee and Cherokee did not use the land in Kentucky as a fixed homeland. They used the land as seasonal and communal grounds.
White settlers took this to mean there are no legal ownership claims by the nations; therefore, it is open for surveying and settling.11
But for the Shawnee, Cherokee, and other Nations, Kentucky was a land used for generations for their food, clothing, and culture.
Elders, from both the northern and southern Nations, taught their young how to properly behave on their journeys throughout Kentucky, like a father teaching their children how to fish. They were taught to respect the wilderness, that each part of the game taken had value, and how to cultivate the land for improved hunting.
Native Americans worked for generations in Kentucky to improve the land specifically for hunting. They created a network of game trails, performed controlled burns to cut down on undergrowth and improve soil composition, and maintained salt licks to attract deer, elk, and bison.12
This is comparable to modern-day hunters setting out a corn crop, planting nut and fruit-bearing trees, and creating pathways for game to cross to improve their chances of filling their hunting tags.
In a timeframe of only twenty years, the feelings between the Native Americans and the Long Hunters started as a “good neighbor” policy, but as the fur traders began to overhunt and waste resources. Territorial disputes began to grow. The Indigenous’ anger increased concerning the growth of white hunters encroaching into their territory to destroy generations worth of the Natives American’s conservation of natural resources.
The Long Hunters began paving the way for early surveyors and people claiming land to move their families from Pennsylvania, Virginia, and North Carolina. The movement and claiming legal ownership of the land turned Kentucky into the “dark and bloody ground” Dragging Canoe warned about.
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1 Henry Popple, -1743, Samuel Harding, and W. H Toms. A Map of the British Empire in America with the French and Spanish Settlements Adjacent Thereto (Library of Congress: 1733) Map.
2 Lewis Collins, History of Kentucky, (Henry Clay Press: 1968), xiv.
3 Thomas D. Clark, Historic Maps of Kentucky, (University of Kentucky Press: 1979), 9.
4 Neal Hammon and Richard Taylor, Virginia’s Western War, 1775-1786, (Stackpole Books: 2002), 4.
5 Clark, Historic Maps of Kentucky, 9.
6 James C. Klotter and Craig Thompson Friend, A New History of Kentucky, 2nd Edition, (University of Kentucky Press: 2018), 18.
7 Klotter and Friend, A New History of Kentucky, 15-16.
8 Klotter and Friend, A New History of Kentucky, 16-17.
9 Hammon and Taylor, Virginia’s Western War, 5.
10 Jacob F. Lee, “What is a Hunting Ground? Reflections on Indigenous Kentucky,” Register of the Kentucky Historical Society, Vol. 121, Number 4, Autumn 2023, 306.
11 Lee, 307.
12 Lee, 314-315.
