Shawnee Indians called  "Ken-tuck-ee"  "The River of Blood" Filled with Ghosts of Slaughtered Inhabitants

Shawnee legends say that during low water their warriors went to Sandy Island and slaughtered the remaining White Indian mound builders.

Prehistoric Men of Kentucky by Col. Bennett A. Young,  1910

       Col. James Moore, of Kentucky, was told by an old Indian that the primitive inhabitants of this state had perished in a war of extermination waged against them by the Indians; that the last great battle was fought at the Falls of the Ohio, (Clarksville Indiana); and that the Indians succeeded in driving the aborigines into a small Island below the rapids, 'where the whole of them were cut pieces'. The colonel was assured that the evidence of this event rested upon facts handed down by tradition, and that he would have decisive proofs of it under his eyes as soon as the waters of the Ohio became low. When the waters of the river had fallen, an examination of Sandy Island was made, and 'a multitude of human bones was discovered'. There is a simular confirmation of this tradition in the statement of General George Rogers Clark , that there was a great bury-ground on the northern side of the river, but a short distance below the Falls. According to a tradition imparted to the same gentleman by the Indian Chief Tobacco, the battle of Sandy Island decided finally the fall of Kentucky, with its ancient inhabitants when Colonel McKee commanded in the Kanawha, (says Doctor Cambell), he was told by the Indian Chief Cornstalk, with whom he had frequent converstions, that Ohio and Kentucky (and Tennessee also is associated with Kentucky in prehistoric ethnography by Rafinesque) had once been settled by white people who were familiar with arts of which the Indians knew nothing; that these whites, after a series of bloody contest with the Indians, had been exterminated; that the old burial places were the graves of an unknown people; and that the old forts had not been built by Indians, but had come down from ' avery long ago' people, who were of a white complexion and skilled in the arts'. More on the mound builders here

       In addition to this tradition testimony, various striking traces of a deadly conflict have been found all along the Ohio border... General Clark declares that Ken-tuck-e in the language of the Indians signifies 'the river of blood'
Shawnee Picture Gallery

      Ken-tuck-e, to the Indian, was a land of ill repute, and, wherever a lodge fire blazed, 'strange and unholy rumors' were busy with her name. The old Indian who described to Colonel Mooore the sanguinary and decisive battle of Sandy Island expressed great astonishment that white people could live in a country which had once been the scene of such conflicts; and an ancient Sac, whom Colonel Joe Hamilton Daveiss met at St. Louis in 1800, gave utterance to simular expressions of surprise. Kentucky, he said was filled with ghost of its slaughtered inhabitants, how could the white man make it his Home?

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The Algonquin War Against the Iroquois Mound Builders

Here the first explorer, Cartier, found Indians of this stock at Hochelaga and Stadaconé, now the sites of Montreal and Quebec. Centuries before his time, according to the native tradition, the ancestors of the Huron-Iroquois family had dwelt in this locality, or still further east and nearer to the river's mouth. As their numbers increased, dissensions arose. The hive swarmed, and band after band moved off to the west and south.

As they spread, they encountered people of other stocks, with whom they had frequent wars. Their most constant and most dreaded enemies were the tribes of the Algonquin family, a fierce and restless people, of northern origin, who everywhere surrounded them. At one period, however, if the concurrent traditions of both Iroquois and Algonquins can be believed, these contending races for a time stayed their strife, and united their forces in an alliance against a common and formidable foe. This foe was the nation, or perhaps the confederacy, of the Alligewi or Talligewi, the semi-civilized "Mound-builders" of the Ohio Valley, who have left their name to the Allegheny river and mountains, and whose vast earthworks are still, after half-a-century of study, the perplexity of archaeologists. A desperate warfare ensued, which lasted about a hundred years, and ended in the complete overthrow and destruction, or expulsion, of the Alligewi. The survivors of the conquered people fled southward, and are supposed to have mingled with the tribes which occupied the region extending from the Gulf of Mexico northward to the Tennessee river and the southern spurs of the Alleghenies. Among these tribes, the Choctaws retained, to recent times, the custom of raising huge mounds of earth for religious purposes and for the sites of their habitations, a custom which they perhaps learned from the Alligewi; and the Cherokees are supposed by some to have preserved in their name (Tsalaki) and in their language indications of an origin derived in part from the same people. Their language, which shows, in its grammar and many of its words, clear evidence of affinity with the Iroquois, has drawn the greater portion of its vocabulary from some foreign source. This source is conjectured to have been the speech of the Alligewi. As the Cherokee tongue is evidently a mixed language, it is reasonable to suppose that the Cherokees are a mixed people, and probably, like the English, an amalgamation of conquering and conquered races. [Footnote: This question has been discussed by the writer in a paper on "Indian Migrations as evidenced by Language," read before the American Association for the Advancement of Science, at their Montreal Meeting, in August, 1882, and published in the American Antiquarian for January and April, 1883.

                                             57 gruesome stories of Indian capture and torture