Simon Butler was not his real name. The young scout who watched the woods around Boone's Kentucky settlements in the 1770s was Simon Kenton, and in 1771, still in his teens, he had run from Fauquier County, Virginia, believing he had killed a man in a fight over a girl. He crossed the Alleghenies on foot with no horse, no money and no plan beyond getting far enough west that no sheriff would follow. The man he left on the floor had lived.

The country Kenton ran into was not empty, and it was not waiting for him. Three years earlier, at Fort Stanwix, the Six Nations had ceded the land south of the Ohio to the British Crown, and the Shawnee, Delaware, Mingo and Cherokee who actually lived and hunted there had never been asked. The Shawnee refused to accept that line, and for a quarter of a century Kentucky was where two claims to the same ground met with rifles and fire.

Kenton's war runs through all of it: Lord Dunmore's campaign of 1774, his capture by the Shawnee in 1778 and the gauntlets at Chillicothe, George Rogers Clark's Long Knives, the disaster at Blue Licks, the raids and counter-raids of the 1780s, and Fallen Timbers in 1794. Across the line stand the Shawnee towns on the Scioto, with their cornfields and council houses and leaders who insisted for twenty years that the Fort Stanwix cession was void.

Kenton helped win Kentucky for the settlers. Then he lost most of his own claims to it in the courts.

The Long Hunter and the Shawnee Towns: Simon Kenton's Kentucky War

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