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“This River Runes North West and Out of ye Westerly Side …”

THE EXACT SPOT on which the story of Buffalo Trace Distillery begins is in the northern reaches of the Commonwealth of Kentucky, known as Bluegrass, the verdant region immediately south of the state of Ohio. This location, whose precise coordinates are 38.2167˚N, 84.8709˚W, is ordinary by most mid-continental topographical standards. It is just a low, dipping bank, a sandy crossing point along the serpentine Kentucky River. However, since the late twentieth century, this site has become a hallowed destination for whiskey lovers, specifically because of the present-day distillery, its engrossing history, and its acclaimed roster of award-winning rye and bourbon whiskeys.

To best set the stage with regard to this point on the North American map and its recent occupant, it is necessary to first time-travel back 11,500 to 12,000 years to the cold, bleak conclusion of planet Earth's Pleistocene Epoch. This frigid period was the bracing remnant, an echo of the Northern Hemisphere's last great Ice Age. North America's two towering, blue-tinted glaciers, the Laurentide that lay east of the Mississippi River and the Cordilleran that lay to the river's west, were slowly receding northward into Canada. In their wake, the glaciers, at some points two miles thick, left great swaths of hardwood forests, carved river valleys and fathomless glacial lakes, grassy pastures, and vast, desolate, and arid plains.

Archaeologists postulate that as long ago as 9500–8000 BCE (Before Common Era) the hunter-gatherer ancestors of today's Native Americans were already active in the area of North America that encompasses parts of the present-day states of Illinois, Indiana, Ohio, Tennessee, Missouri, West Virginia, New York, Virginia, and Kentucky. Geologists refer to this distinctive area as the Salina Basin, a sprawling region south of the Great Lakes that is rich in deep layers of minerals and rock-salt deposits.1 Tribal histories point out that the Native Americans utilized salt as a condiment. In the slowly warming environmental conditions of the period, the small, nomadic groups of indigenous hunters became skilled in stalking big game, including mammalian behemoths like the wooly mammoth, bison, short-faced bear, dire wolf, ground sloth, and mastodon. Other predators included smilodons, the huge and ferocious genus of saber-toothed cats that without fuss or hesitation efficiently preyed on all mammals, including the era's scrawny, but swift and clever homo sapiens (Latin, “wise man”).

During the same period, a fateful North American event, called the “Pleistocene megafauna extinction,” occurred. In the relatively brief span of hundreds of years, as many as 90 genera of megafauna, that group of large mammals weighing more than 100 pounds, vanished due to a docket of still-speculative reasons. These possible causes included the gyrations in global climate as the Earth incrementally warmed; evolving terrain due to volcanic or seismic activity; widespread drought; overhunting by the increasingly adept and resourceful aboriginal tribes; and, perhaps most spectacularly, the yet-to-be discovered impact of an asteroid. Though major annihilations of plant, insect, and animal life have regularly occurred throughout the annuls of the Earth's history, no overwhelming body of evidence points to a single cause of such an extreme destruction of large mammals as the Pleistocene era closed. Most likely, this mass elimination happened due to a confluence of two or more of the cited causes. One result of significant note, however, involves one member of Pleistocene megafauna that somehow survived this cataclysmic event: the rugged bison.

With the heating up of North America's climate through the Archaic Period of 8000–1000 BCE, conditions in the Salina Basin region became more tolerable for the growing numbers of native peoples who populated the Bluegrass. Critically, fresh water was plentiful in the area presently known as Kentucky, as were big game and fresh water fish. The northwesterly flowing Kentucky and Licking rivers and their tributaries, along with cold-water springs, sinkholes, lakes and ponds formed through crevices in the karst, or limestone ridge, known as the Cincinnati Arch, created an accommodating habitat in which flora, fauna, and the hunter-gatherer native peoples could survive.

In the 2,000-year period that is known as the “Woodland Period,” from 1000 BCE to 1000 CE (Common Era), the social structure of the tribal populace grew more complex, as more permanent communities and residential compounds, some based upon primitive agriculture, began to be established. Pottery and basket-weaving became important skills and cultural emblems that defined tribal identities. The cultivation of crops centered mostly on the “three sisters” of Pan-American agriculture, beans, squash, and maize (also known as Indian corn), but also included the seasonal growing of amaranth, sunflower, and tobacco. By 450 BCE, the tribes started to build burial mounds in northern Kentucky, signaling another characteristic of a community-oriented society and the conclusion, at least in part, of nomadic lifestyles. The intersecting river system of the Bluegrass provided convenient highways by bark canoe or dugout that promoted inter-tribal trade and the movement between the Shawnee, Cherokee, Chickasaw, Wyandot, Delaware, Mosopelea, and Yuchi hunting camps.

Once the Americas were pried open by the voyages of Christopher Columbus in the 1490s, European monarchs rushed to gain footholds in the exotic continents to the west for the express purposes of mining their untapped natural resources, in particular, gold, silver, and beaver furs, and to claim territory for the expansion of their kingdoms. Spain and Portugal were especially active in exploration throughout the sixteenth century. Their aggressive exploits caused deep concern in the courts of their main commercial and military rivals, England and France.

Then, in 1607, a century prior to the formation of the Kingdom of Great Britain, three vessels sailing under the flag of England landed at what is now coastal Virginia. They were members of the chartered Virginia Company. Their mission was to create a colony, to be christened Jamestown, in North America for the English monarch King James I. Jamestown's harrowing struggles with famine, disease, and bitter clashes with the Algonquin tribe are widely known.

In 1609, James I proclaimed the vast expanse of lands northwest and west of Virginia, that included the area that would later become Kentucky, as the property of the royal colony. With that event as well as earlier incursions by the French and Spanish, the days of the eastern native tribes' reign became numbered. In the latter half of the seventeenth century, initial forays from Spanish and French Jesuit priests, trappers, and explorers like Robert de la Salle, Jacques Marquette, and Louis Jolliet deep into the North American heartland had already taken place. From 1650 to 1675, expeditions led by Euro-American colonists from Virginia and North Carolina traveling as far west as the Mississippi River passed through northern Kentucky, provoking the native tribes.

A remarkably vivid letter written on August 22, 1674 at Fort Henry in colonial Virginia by fur trader Colonel Abraham Wood to London-based investor John Richards described in startling detail the expeditions of two explorers, James Needham and Gabriel Arthur, Wood's servant.2 Ten jam-packed pages of derring-do chronicle their exploits over the course of two years, depicting with aching clarity the severity of the trials posed by such ventures of the period. Colonel Wood in April 1673 commissioned Needham and Arthur to venture into the wild regions west of the Virginia and Carolina colonies in order to reach a trade agreement with the Cherokee tribe. The letter addresses how the men “… killd many swine, sturgin [sturgeon] and beavers and barbecued them …” It spoke of Needham and Arthur's numerous tense encounters with the suspicious native tribes. In one intriguing passage, Wood speaks of how “This river runes north west and out of ye westerly side it goeth another great river about a days journey lower where the inhabitance are an inumarable company of Indians …” It is clear from the report that Needham and Arthur's travels covered a wide range of territory that lay directly to the west of the Virginia and North Carolina colonies. The language suggests that their journeys might well have included northern Kentucky, where two rivers, the Kentucky and the Licking, run in a northwesterly direction.

James Needham unfortunately came to a horrific end at the hands of a tribal warrior and guide called Occhonechee Indian John, “… a fatt thick bluff faced fellow …” who reportedly first shot Needham “… neare ye burr of ye eare …” after a heated, day-long disagreement. He then hacked open Needham's chest with a tomahawk, ripped out his heart, and held it aloft for all his companions to see. Wood's account of James Needham's death reported, “… ye Tomahittans started to rescue Needham but Indian John was too quick for them, soe died the heroyick English man.”

Arthur barely survived the violence, ending up first as a captive but later as a trusted companion of the tribal chief of the native band referred to by Wood as Tomahittans, more commonly known as Cherokees. After being wounded in the arm from an arrow, taking part in...