Kickapoo on the Kentucky frontier

Indiana’s Department of Natural Resources says Kickapoo and Mascouten groups moved from Illinois into west-central Indiana in the 1730s and 1740s. There were no Kickapoo villages in Kentucky, and none of the sources cited here documents Kickapoo raids on Kentucky stations.

The documented tie runs the other way. In June 1791 Kentucky volunteers under Brig. Gen. Charles Scott attacked towns on the Wabash, and Scott reported burning a Kickapoo village. That August, Lt. Col. James Wilkinson led a second Kentucky force against the Wabash towns and set out for "the Kickapoo town in the prairie," but turned back short of supplies.

The Kickapoo were named as a party to the 1795 Treaty of Greenville, and the 1805 Grouseland treaty with Delaware, Potawatomi, Miami, Eel River and Wea leaders preserved any Kickapoo claim to the country they occupied on the Vermillion River.