Iroquois Beaver Wars

The fighting reached across the Great Lakes and into the Ohio Valley.

Historian A. Gwynn Henderson notes that early written references to peoples in the Bluegrass and middle Ohio Valley are mostly secondhand reports, and that some groups had already moved or merged with others before Europeans arrived. Disease spread along trade routes and reduced populations in the region.

By the 1700s the Iroquois "wanted to control the Ohio Valley," Henderson writes, and they asserted rights over it as conquerors. The Shawnee, who claimed much of Kentucky and lived and hunted there, disputed that. In 1768 at Fort Stanwix the Six Nations sold their claim to Kentucky east of the Tennessee River to the British Crown.