An Odd Pastime

[Ninurta]

I read very little on the Kame because they were further north. More towards present day Findlay and Lima from my understanding. But 10,000 years is the end of the Ice Age in Ohio. The amazing part is the Shawnee took all the land of the Fort Ancient people but never fought them as they were gone. And the Shawnee were an offshoot of the Algonquian that broke away from wars with the Iroquois. But they still skirmished with the Cherokee in Kentucky and held alliance with the Miami in Ohio. Of course both Shawnee and Miami moved around quite a bit as for their main areas.

The Shawnee do have a legend of having fought "Red Haired Giants" in Kentucky. They wiped that people entirely out, but say that the spirits of them would not allow the Shawnee to settle in Kentucky - that the spirits would allow them to hunt there when the children were hungry, but would not allow settlement.

There was one Shawnee settlement that I know of in Eastern Kentucky near Blue Licks called Eskipakithikki, but it only lasted about 20 years before they left Kentucky altogether, ran out by the spirits of the land. That's why the Shawnee only claimed KY as hunting grounds. The Cherokee also "claimed" Kentucky as hunting grounds, but sold their interest to Richard Henderson... then told him that he'd bought it, now it was up to him to defend it... that should have been a red flag right there that it wasn't an undisputed claim I reckon.

As near as I can determine, the boundary between Shawnee and Cherokee lands was the Clinch River in Southwest VA, despite what the Bureau of Enthnology would have you believe. The last battle between the two was fought around 1769 at War Ridge in Tazewell County, VA, on the Paint Lick fork of Clinch. Paint Lick Mountain still has the paintings and petroglyphs from innumerable religious visits to it. Those paintings are how Paint Lick got it's name. It was sacred land on the border between the Shawnee and Cherokee.

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