Big Bone Lick 1: “The Approach to Big Bone Lick” – a mini-podcast with text!

Author: Reggie Van Stockum
Published: Sat 08 Mar 2025
Episode Link: https://vanstockum.blog/2025/03/08/big-bone-lick-1-the-approach-to-big-bone-lick-a-mini-podcast-with-text/

Big Bone Lick in Northern Kentucky along the Ohio River, holds a special position in the record of science, history and culture. It must have been a place of almost magical attraction for the Ice Age creatures that would cross such a wide river to reach it. And perhaps ,for the hunting humans that followed them in, a site of mystical and religious significance. It certainly came to be so for the European scientists who first examined the giant fossils buried there!

Thanks to Neil Kesterson and his Dynamix Studio in Lexington, Kentucky for the audio recording!

Here is the text to the podcast!

THE APPROACH TO BIG BONE LICK

The French had it good in the newly discovered continent called North America. Sailing down the St. Lawrence Seaway they had established Quebec, Montreal, and even a fort at the straits of Mackinac between Lakes Huron and Michigan. From there, they had explored the Mississippi River through Louisiana and reached what would become New Orleans at the Gulf of Mexico. They hoped to block off that pesky English presence on the continent’s eastern coastline. Except that wasn’t really working.

There were Native American tribes down that river and one of them, the Chickasaw, had allied with the British and traded in their more available goods. There were more British than French in America, and they were industrious in their production. And French Canada was a long way from French Louisiana. On the highlands overlooking the Mississippi River just north of what eventually would become Memphis, Tennessee, were the Chickasaw Bluffs. They were not easy to get by if the Chickasaw didn’t want you to get through.

By 1736, the French Government had had enough. They sent a powerful French force up from New Orleans to subjugate the Chickasaw peoples. They were defeated. The French, that is. And that didn’t sit well with the French King, Louis the XV.

So, in 1739, he committed to a new military campaign against the Chickasaw. Costing four times his annual income from Louisiana, the King sent over siege guns and committed French forces from Montreal and Mackinac to the expedition. Four-thousand soldiers, citizens, and Native Americans converged upon Fort Assumption, located in what is now downtown Memphis.

This time, it was different. Weather, disease, and recalcitrant road conditions simply stopped the French from moving effectively forward. Only a last-ditch effort by French Captain Pierre Joseph Celoron would result in a temporary treaty. Yes, the same Captain Celoron who would bury lead plates along the Ohio River 15 years later in a further failed attempt to demonstrate French sovereignty.

The troops from Montreal came down the Ohio River under the command of Charles Le Moyne de Longueuil. It is through Longueuil that we first take notice of Big Bone Lick in Kentucky. A salt swamp, it was well known to the Native Americans who attributed the giant bones found there to the “Great Buffalo.” Longueuil collected giant molars, a huge tusk, and leg bones. Then he planted the French flag. But he didn’t write much about his visit.

There were three other French officers down there with Longueuil who would write themselves into the history of the early United States. Fifteen years later, they would confront George Washington at Fort LeBoeuf, Fort Necessity, and Fort Duquesne, and bring further the meaning to this story.

Longueuil’s troops didn’t make much of a difference to the Chickasaw conflict. And when the French forces departed for home, up the river, Longueuil floated south to New Orleans, where he sailed off to France and out of this story. Except that in Paris he deposited those giant bones in the King’s “Cabinet of Curiosities.”

And the world would never be the same again!

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