Big Bone Lick 2: “Baron de Longueuil, Big Bone Lick and George Washington” – a mini-podcast with text!

The early French visitors to Big Bone Lick would impact the formation of our great nation. But the fossils that they sent back to France would require radical thinking to sort out!

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

And here is the text to the podcast!

                BARON DE LONGUEUIL, BIG BONE LICK,  

                         AND GEORGE WASHINGTON

It is the 1739 French expedition down the Ohio River that is of immediate interest herein.  And because history and geography are so compatible, and the future twists back on its past, that expedition will link us to George Washington and his triggering of the French and Indian War fifteen years later!

            New France in America was often led by large French families with royal connections.  And so it is in this story.  For Charles Le Moyne of Montreal, the 1st Baron de Longueuil, was one of eight famous brothers.  And one of them was known as Bienville, who became the Governor of French Louisiana and founded New Orleans in 1718.

In 1739, the French King looked to him to deal with those troublesome Chickasaw Indians who were blocking travel down the Mississippi River.  So Bienville called in reinforcements from French Canada where his brother’s son was now in charge of the military forces at Montreal.  His name was also Charles, and as the 2nd Baron de Longueuil, is the central subject of this essay.

            For the expedition to assist his French brethren in Louisiana, Longueuil assembled about 450 men to canoe down the Ohio River after portaging their boats over from Lake Erie to the headwaters of the Allegheny River.  Floating down to the junction with the Monongahela River, Longueuil noted the high lands where the rivers came together to form the Ohio.

It was at that point that the French would later build Fort Duquesne.  And this French expansion into the Ohio River’s headwater was the reason that George Washington would be sent from Virginia in 1753 to tell the French to go back home.

            On that journey, Washington met with French commander, Jacques Legardeur de Saint-Pierre at Fort Le Boeuf up near Lake Erie and handed him a letter from Virginia British Governor Robert Dinwiddie.  Legardeur was polite, offering wine and dinner, and sent Washington back with a letter of rejection.  Legardeur was part of Longueuil’s expedition in 1739 and was with him when he planted the French flag at Big Bone Lick in Kentucky.  And in another link in this strange twist of history, Washington was led in by frontiersman Christopher Gist, who had explored in Kentucky in 1751 and had also visited Big Bone Lick.

            Washington came back in force in 1754 but was himself, forced to surrender his hastily constructed Fort Necessity by the French leader Louis Coulon de Villiers.  Washington’s soldiers had killed his brother at the Battle of Jumonville Glen.  Villiers was also with Longueuil’s 1739 expedition down the Ohio which stopped at Big Bone Lick.

            In 1755, the French routed and defeated General Edward Braddock’s British Army trying to seize Fort Duquesne.  Washington was with him then and led the retreat.  And Washington was with a second English Army led by General John Forbes who later approached the French Fort in 1758.  French commander Captain Francois-Marie de Lignery burned down Fort Duquesne rather than surrender it.  De Lignery also accompanied Longueuil on the 1739 Ohio River expedition and was with him at Big Bone Lick.

            So, it was a diverse group of future leaders headed down the Ohio River in 1739 from French Canada.  And it was the first French expedition to do so in force.  There were 125 French inhabitants, military officers, and about 325 Native Americans.  And they had all heard of the Big Bone Lick and knew how to reach it.

            So Longueuil found it, planted the French flag, and collected three huge molars, a giant femur, and a long tusk.  Then he continued on down the Ohio River without recording much else about what would become the most important legacy of the expedition.

Instead of returning immediately to Canada after an unsuccessful campaign, the 52-year-old Longueuil floated down to New Orleans and sailed back to France and out of significance to this writing.  Except that he deposited those fossil bones from Big Bone Lick at the “Cabinet du Roi” of French King Louis XV, where Georges-Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon [1707-1788] began to study them.  By 1766, Buffon had developed his bizarre theory of “American Degeneracy,” claiming that life in the “New World” was inferior to that in Europe.  Thomas Jefferson strenuously opposed this unscientific assertion and spent much time writing and working against it.

But Jefferson had struggled with the thought that the creature from Big Bone Lick that had possessed such monstrous molars could have gone extinct.  That recognition would change religious thinking.  And Thomas Jefferson initially opposed that radical change in biblical interpretation!

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