Like stars, salt resources oriented the movements of mammals and their hunters for millennia. The result was an intricate web of trails, traces, and roads that facilitated and directed human movement. Reconstructed maps of Indigenous roadways through northern Kentucky show paths starting and ending at places like Es-kip-pa-ki-thi-ki and Upper and Lower Blue Licks, all sites of major salt springs and licks. Shawnees had departed the Ohio Country during the early seventeenth century in response to war, disease, and political instability. We may imagine their eventual return to places like Lower Shawneetown, at the confluence of the Scioto and Ohio rivers, occurred along these familiar pathways. Through the eighteenth century, Shawnees continued to reinforce the significance of these veritably ancient networks.
Salt production was also part of the diverse economies dominated by Indigenous peoples in the eighteenth-century Ohio Country. This was especially true at Lower Shawneetown, where its residents engaged in a generations-old practice of exploiting rich local springs. Visiting the bustling Lower Shawneetown in January of 1751, British trader Christopher Gist noted that “The Indians and Traders make salt for their horses” from a local spring “by boiling it.” As A. Gwynn Henderson has demonstrated, local salt makers seemed to have replaced their shallow ceramic pans, which their predecessors had used since at least the 1100s through the early seventeenth century, with kettles by the mid-eighteenth century. When a hunting party departed Lower Shawneetown for Big Bone Lick in 1755, for instance, they took kettles and two captured colonists with them “to make salt.” Perhaps they intended to use the salt to treat hides, season or preserve meat, or supplement their trading wares.
Salt making was no small task. Even the strongest, cleanest brine required close watch, constant maintenance, and physically demanding labor to ensure a useable final product. As Susan Sleeper-Smith and A. Gwynn Henderson have suggested, salt making seems to have been one of the many industries managed by Indigenous women in the Ohio Country. Perhaps that is why one group of Shawnees, who captured Daniel Boone and a group of squatters in the winter of 1777-1778, forced the male captives to make salt while travelling northward along the Scioto River. Whether it was the physical taxation or the embarrassment of doing women’s work under the orders of Indigenous men, the captives came to resent the task of salt making. One captive, James Callaway, refused to carry kettles and salt forfeited by William Brooks. When a Shawnee man took out his tomahawk, Callaway responded with dramatic defiance—“strike! I would as lie here as go along, and I won’t tote your kettle”—after which the salt-making gear was assigned to someone else.