Kentucky's Frontier Trails

The shapefile alignments serve as the authors' best possible representation of the actual trails used as of 1795. Documented and verifiable edit suggestions are welcome! An brief description of the project: During America's colonial period, the trans-Appalachian west, though largely terra incognita to people living on the eastern seaboard and occupied by significant numbers of native peoples, lay open to initial forays by hunters, explorers, surveyors, and settlers. The earliest overland travel routes to traverse western Virginia lands, country that eventually became the Commonwealth of Kentucky, were established between the 1750s and 1780. The primary trails that provided access for emigrants moving into Kentucky and the Northwest Territory's Ohio Valley have been of long-standing historic importance. They include the southeastern gateway where concurrent gaps truncate Cumberland and Pine Mountain; the Indians' Warrior's Path (partially adopted by white pioneers) to the great Bluegrass Shawnee town at Eskippakithiki ; Daniel Boone's Trace to Fort Boonesborough; and the Wilderness Road to Fort Harrod (Harrodsburg) and the Falls of the Ohio at Louisville. In 1800, Kentucky's population had reached some 220,000. A large proportion of these individuals-or their ancestors-white and black, free and slave, moved into the state via one or more of these three originary routes (Speed, 1886 [1971], p. 7) Pioneer roads-including the highly publicized and much romanticized trans-west trails to Santa Fe and Oregon-were avenues of migration to developing western frontiers and thus are iconic linear places around which historical fact and contemporary fiction coalesce. Such first generation roads have been associated with the American version of the frontier myth wherein a hero investigates the unknown pristine wilderness, asserts control over it, and appropriates its resources from small groups of savages. Settlers follow the hero's original route and arrogate the new lands (Stoeltje, 1987, p. 239). Given their primacy, some roads, with the passage of time, became stimuli to notions of collective heritage and romanticized concepts of frontier life that are often associated with stalwart frontier folk-Daniel Boone being foremost among them. In Kentucky, contemporary residents depict their heritage in "reenactments," shrines, roadside historic site markers, historic preservation priorities, and state and national historic sites and parks. The state's historical society has erected some 35 roadside markers commemorating pioneer roads, and the state's road-related parks include Cumberland Gap National Historical Park, and Levi Jackson, Fort Boonesborough, and Old Fort Harrod state parks. Our principle objective was to map at the largest practicable scale Kentucky's three primary eighteenth-century frontier trails-the Warrior's Path, Boone's Trace, and the Wilderness Road-and the sites associated with pioneer settlement linked by these roads. We wished to consolidate information from those historical sources that permitted plotting locations accurately. Eighteenth-century explorers' maps and reports, surveyors' notes, travelers' diaries, and other information sources about the western frontier were often locationally incomplete, imprecise, or distorted by present standards. Information from such sources may be adequate to suggest highly generalized route alignments but of limited value for drafting contemporary large scale trail maps. While acknowledging the idiosyncrasies inherent in historical records, we sought to glean from them precise point and route locations and, where warranted and possible, aggregate those locations into an accurate base map. We wished to do this consistently and unambiguously because subtle distinctions in the exact location of historic routes and related settlement sites can affect the nature of the questions one is prompted to pose and the reliability of the conclusions that one can draw about pioneer knowledge, preferences, and behaviors (Elliott and Talbert, 2002, pp. 145-162). A full bibliography is listed on the companion Kentucky Frontier Trails poster, or available upon request. 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