The Battle of Blue Licks was the last of the Revolutionary
War in what was to become Kentucky. The bloody confrontation
wiped out 70 to 80 of the militia - about 7 percent of the white
male population in the territory - in 15 minutes.
Posted on 08/14/2007 2:30:43 PM PDT by Pharmboy
Ten months to the day after Lord Cornwallis surrendered to George Washington at Yorktown to effectively validate the American Revolution, a force of British Loyalists and Indian allies mauled a contingent of Kentucky militia pursuing them.
The Battle of Blue Licks was the last of the Revolutionary
War in what was to become Kentucky. The bloody confrontation
wiped out 70 to 80 of the militia - about 7 percent of the white
male population in the territory - in 15 minutes.
Although the battle was a bitter defeat for the Americans, it set the stage for the expedition less than a year later of George Rogers Clark with more than a thousand rifleman against the Shawnee, driving them from their villages along the Ohio River and destroying Chillicothe, a large Shawnee base, in what is now Ohio.
The battle's 225th anniversary re-enactment is Saturday and Sunday, and more than 4,000 visitors - including several hundred re-enactors - are expected to converge at the Blue Licks Battlefield State Resort Park in Carlisle. They'll be the first to enjoy the newly renovated Pioneer Museum at the park, which reopens Saturday.
There's just something about reenacting, said Lee Jacobson, a Dearborn, Mich., resident who will play Capt. William Caldwell, leader of Butler's Rangers, the victors in the battle.
"Part of it is just living the history and sleeping in the tents and cooking the food," said Jacobsen, who likes playing Caldwell because the captain was from Michigan. "You can really appreciate history when you're actually a part of it."
Tensions were still running high on the frontier in the year after the main British force surrendered in Virginia, so it was not a big surprise that Butler's Rangers - a force of Loyalists who formed along the Canada-New York border to fight the American rebels - attacked the pioneer settlement at Bryan's Station, burning down houses, cutting down cornfields and killing livestock for two days.
When the attackers withdrew and headed north, a force of nearly 200 militia quickly gathered to chase them. The Loyalists and their Indian allies crossed the Licking River at Blue Licks ford - in what is now Robertson County - and hid in the heavily wooded hillside, waiting for their hunters to catch up.
The bloody confrontation wiped out 70 to 80 of the militia --
about 7 percent of the territory's white male population -- in 15
minutes.
That happened on the morning of Aug. 19, 1782. After much debate among the militiamen's commanders, Col. John Todd and Lt. Cols. Stephen Trigg and Daniel Boone, the Kentuckians charged after their adversaries
They were quickly outnumbered and overwhelmed. Todd, Trigg and Boone's youngest son, Israel, were killed, forever etching Blue Licks in U.S. history books as the site of one of America's worst Revolutionary War defeats.
"Capt. William Caldwell's one goal was to hit as many frontier forts as possible and to draw them into one large engagement," said park naturalist Paul Tierney. "That one large engagement was the Battle of Blue Licks, and he executed it perfectly."
Re-enactors are expected to converge at the site from as near as Ohio and as far as Ontario.
"We have had a huge response from the Butler's Rangers - maybe it's because they won," Tierney said.
Recent renovations to the Pioneer Museum will take park visitors closer to the Revolutionary War than ever before.
A new three-dimensional diorama of the battleground traces Boone and company from their officers' council meeting at about 7:35 a.m. on that August morning to the Indians' first shots from the wooded ravines along the ridge at 8:15 a.m. By 8:30 a.m., Israel Boone had been killed and survivors from the Kentucky militia were fleeing across the river, back to Bryan Station.
Engineering students from Morehead State University created the model out of foam core, using GPS technology to produce an exact scale of the state park. Below the diorama are 14 text boxes that provide minute-by-minute descriptions and locations of the Kentucky militia, which are traced on the surface of the model.
"I always imagined people who studied the history of the Battle of Blue Licks looking at this and saying, 'Well, I think they came up this way,'" said Tierney. "That's precisely what this piece is supposed to do: to spark conversation, speculation and an interest in the battle."
Steve Caudill, a retired police officer from Winchester, will play Daniel Boone in the re-enactment. At 44, Caudill is the same age as Boone was at the height of the Revolutionary War. He says that he matches up with Boone in height, weight, hair and eye color.
The Kentuckians were surprised at the size of the force - about 1,000 Shawnee and Wyandot Indians were with Butler's Rangers - they came up against at Blue Licks, Caudill said.
"We were just caught off guard," said Caudill, who will portray Boone at several Kentucky Chautauqua programs during the weekend. "We had no idea that there were that many Shawnee warriors in that area."
Jacobsen, 59, has been playing Caldwell across the country for 35 years. He said he's looking forward to being on the winning side at Blue Licks.
While studying at Oakland University in Rochester, Mich., Jacobsen joined a Civil War reenactment group. He's traveled as far as Belgium for a reenactment of the Battle of Waterloo, where he camped out in 14th century monasteries.
Jacobsen believes that the Brown Bess, a British-issued musket, helped Butler's Rangers and the Indians prevail.
"I can load a Brown Bess about four times a minute," said Jacobsen, an auto parts manufacturer in Dearborn. "It takes about a minute to load a rifle. So by the time Boone and his men loaded their rifles, they had a problem there."
The battlefield exhibit is only the beginning of the new-and-improved Pioneer Museum. The Kentucky State Park System received $35 million for park projects through a 2005 bond issue and allotted $150,000 to the museum for renovations, said state parks spokesman Gil Lawson.
The two-story museum features exhibits tracing thousands of years of life at Blue Licks.
One of the first creatures to ever roam Blue Licks is commemorated near the museum's exit. When Thomas Hunter went digging for the source of a mineral spring in 1897, he found a mastodon tusk and jawbone, now on display.
"Mr. Hunter rolled out of here with five wagonloads of bones from the Blue Licks Springs and we are very, very lucky to have a lot of that collection," said Tierney. "We'll be putting those on display and interpreting them as well."
Old maps inside the museum document how European settlers pressured Native Americans off their land.
"Contrary to popular belief, there were permanent Indian settlements in Kentucky prior to European contact," said Tierney. "By the time of European contact, these Indian villages were all but eliminated off the face of the Earth."
The museum recounts the story of the Lower Blue Licks mineral springs, which drew Indians to the spot and in the 19th Century spawned a hotel and a bottling company and attracted wealthy families before going dry in 1896.
An Indian re-enactor faces the opposition during the Battle of Blue Licks.
"People from all over would travel up here to drink and bathe in the therapeutic waters," said park manager Stefanie Gaither. "They believed it had healing powers and would promote long health."
Artifacts of the battle include a pioneer powder horn and an Indian tomahawk and a green-and-red Butler's Rangers replica uniform.
Jacobsen also contributed a Brown Bess stamped by the Tower of London and a gold officer's button believed to have belonged to Caldwell.
"It's one thing to give presentations in a mock battle, but when you can actually go into a museum and take the time as a visitor to read about it, that's going to touch a lot more people," said Jacobsen. "Everybody in Kentucky knows Daniel Boone, but now they'll now who he was fighting."
Caudill said the park makes history come alive.
"When our children sit down, a lot of times we teach them numbers and dates," he said. "But at Blue Licks, you'll get to see the way we walked, the way we talked, the way we dressed and the struggles we went through to make Kentucky our home."
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BTTT!
Salt licks were very important for Daniel Boone and early Kentucky.
Theodore Roosevelt wrote about that in his The Winning of the West.
I (sheepishly also) never heard of of this battle either. I did know that the war with the Brits and Indians continued on the frontier long after Yorktown. That is why Washington struggled mightily to keep the Army together until the final treaty was concluded.
"Contrary to popular belief, there were permanent Indian settlements in Kentucky prior to European contact," said Tierney. "By the time of European contact, these Indian villages were all but eliminated off the face of the Earth."
The two paragraphs pretty much contradict each other. My understanding is that by 1700, if not earlier, very few Indians lived in KY, as it was no mans land between the northern and southern Indians.
Thanks for the ping. I need to learn more about this battle.
So, where was the Battle of Red Licks fought? ;’)
bttt
I don’t know the truth of the matter, but I suppose they could be saying that pressure from European settlement expansion drove the Indians into conflict and the no-mans-land idea, or something like that. I’d like to hear whether the statements were in error or what really went on.
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