As the early pioneers worked their way south and west in Virginia, they crossed the mountains through the Cumberland Gap into Kentucky or proceeded down the valley into Tennessee, along the trails the buffalo had followed on their way east. In both states they found much larger herds than they had ever seen east of the mountains. Daniel Boone reported vast herds in 1764 on the upper Cumberland, and an early traveler named Ramsay found "an immense number of buffalo and other wild game. The country was crowded with them. Their bellowings sounded from the hills and forests." This report was from what is now the city of Nashville. Many large salt licks, each visited by buffalo herds, were reported all along the Cumberland Valley.
When the first settlers to Kentucky had passed the Cumberland Gap, they continued northwest and finally emerged in the lowlands. Here they were surprised to find a great open space of grasslands, 6,000 square miles, which they called the Kentucky barrens, thinking at first that the soil was too poor to grow timber.
In a short time they found that the soil was very good indeed and that the original forests there had been cleared by the Shawnee Indians, who each year crossed the Ohio River to hunt big game, particularly buffalo and elk. They burned off the dried grass each fall, and in the process burned some of the adjacent woods to make larger pastures for their game animals.
Although the soil in the barrens proved to be excellent for farming, the settlers put their farms along the woodland fringe, where the soil was a little poorer and encumbered with large trees that had to be cleared before crops could be planted. It was easier to carve out little cornfields from the open timber than it was to transport enough logs into the barrens to build houses, barns, fences, and to supply firewood. This dependence of the pioneers on nearby timber continued until they had better means of transportation.
The Kentucky barrens furnished much better buffalo range than did the Cumberland Valley to the south, which in turn was superior to the Piedmont east of the mountains. With the better pastures, the herds of buffalo in Kentucky were larger and more numerous than those to the south or east. Early visitors from the east frequently expressed surprise at the large number of animals in one place, usually at a salt lick. While a herd of sixty had been considered large among the scattered pines of the Piedmont, and in Kentucky a herd numbering from 300 to 600 animals would be called vast, out on the Great Plains it would require a herd of several thousand to rate such adjectives.
Colonel George Croghan, who visited the central part of Kentucky in 1765, noted, "In our way we passed through a fine timbered clear wood; we came into a large road which the buffaloes have beaten, spacious enough for two wagons to go abreast, and leading straight into the lick."
Captain Harry Gordon visited the same place the next year.
We encamped opposite the great Lick, and the next day I went with a party of Indians and batteaumen to view this much talked of place. The beaten roads from all quarters to it easily conducted us, as they resemble those to an inland village where cattle go to and from a large common. The extent of the muddy part of the lick is 3/4 of an acre. This mud being of salt quality is greedily licked by buffalo, elk and deer, who come from distant parts in great numbers for this purpose.
Daniel Boone reported of the Red River country in 1770: ''The buffaloes were more frequent than I have ever seen cattle in the settlements, browsing on the leaves of the cane, or cropping the herbage of those extensive plains, fearless because ignorant of man. Sometimes we saw hundreds in a drove, and the numbers about the salt spring were amazing."
Simon Kenton, an early settler in Kentucky, estimated that he had seen about 1,500 animals in one herd near this lick.
The large number of buffalo and their lack of fear led to senseless slaughter. In May 1775, a traveler named Henderson wrote this entry in his diary:
We found it very difficult at first to stop great waste in killing meat. Some would kill three, four, five, or half a dozen buffaloes, and not take half a horse load from them all…. Our game was driven off… [until] fifteen or twenty miles was as short a distance a good hunter thought of getting meat, and sometimes they were obliged to go thirty miles, though by chance once or twice a week a buffalo was killed within five or six miles.
In addition to attacks by the hunters, the buffalo suffered in winter when snow turned to cold rain then froze, making a crust of ice on the snow, which prevented them from feeding. Simon Kenton reported a very severe winter in 1779-80, "when from the middle of November to the last of February all Kentucky was shrouded in snow and ice… and even buffalo would come so close to the settlements that they could be shot from the cabin doors."
A large portion of the Kentucky herd survived even this, for Kenton reported sizable numbers at the forks of Licking River in 1782, and John Filson, a writer visiting Kentucky, reported in 1784: "I have heard a hunter assert that he saw above one thousand buffaloes at Blue Licks at once; so numerous were they before the settlers wantonly sported away their lives. The amazing herds of buffalo which resort hither, by their size and numbers, fill the traveler with amazement and terror."
When the Kentucky settlements were new and the settlers few, they had plenty of wild meat for their tables. Some of the older settlers thought the supply of game had a bad effect on the farmers, for they put in less time and effort on their crops when they had plenty of food from hunting. The game, including the buffalo, was killed off in about thirty years, the last buffalo on record in the state being killed in 1800.
On the northern side of the Ohio River the whole Ohio Valley had long been occupied by Indians living in farming villages and growing corn as their chief crop. These Indians spent much of their time heaping up huge earthworks of various shapes over their dead and thus earned themselves the title Mound Builders.
Their whole culture complex of raising large quantities of corn and building great mounds changed rapidly about the time the first buffalo herds came in from the west, leading some scholars to suggest that the presence of the buffalo in appreciable numbers was the prime factor in the change. The herds overran the cornfields, eating the young plants in early summer and trampling down the stalks at any season, drastically cutting the yield and imperiling the food supply. The Kentucky pioneers had this same problem with buffalo in their corn until the herds had been killed.
The Mound Builders did not need to go hungry when their corn was damaged; they killed the buffalo. The suggestion is that the tribes shifted much of their attention to hunting as more rewarding, for it gave them more desirable food.
Another important factor in the change was a series of attacks from tribes that invaded the Ohio country from the northwest. The Mound Builders finally gave up the struggle. The survivors took to their canoes and escaped down the Mississippi to less dangerous lands. One such tribe was the Mosopelea, which left the Ohio Valley about the middle of the seventeenth century and moved south to the Yazoo Valley in Mississippi.