I’m standing on the levee above the Portland Wharf Park, facing north toward the Ohio River. Below me, a coal barge drifts into the mouth of the McAlpine Lock, at the tip of Sand Island, and a man stands alone on the steep bank, fishing. Beside me, to the east, the K&I Railroad bridge spans the river to Indiana, and in the scrub woods beneath it, homeless camps are tucked back among the thin trees. On the far side, behind the flood wall, a row of mansions stretches along New Albany’s Main Street.
History is largely hidden here. Beneath the field of the park, for example, the remains of a town are buried under the silt—the paving stones and iron mooring rings of the wharf, streets, cisterns, and house foundations. Archaeologists have gathered artifacts here: porcelain, bottle glass, smoking pipes, nails.
The railroad bridge, which opened in 1886, supports two roadways hung along the trusses, though it’s been closed to traffic for more than forty years. Any crossing is deterred by barriers and sprays of bushes obscuring the metal ramp. Today all that crosses here are the freight trains. But more than two centuries ago, this was where herds of bison crossed the shallows and stamped a path into the Kentucky country.
In Big Bone Lick State Park in Boone County, northern Kentucky, there is a hiking trail called Bison Trace that sets off downhill from the visitors center toward a meadow. Past the woods, where the trail ends at a fence, you can see a herd of bison in a prairie. The largest of all North American land mammals, what early Europeans once erroneously called buffalo, their herds traversed Kentucky for at least hundreds of years before they entirely disappeared from the commonwealth by around 1800. The few animals at Big Bone Lick are reintroduced.
But the bison were in no way relegated historically to that corner of the state. So the question I begin with is this: how many of us know that buffalo once passed through what is now the city of Louisville?
There seems, at first glance, little indication here that buffalo were a part of the landscape on these plains along the Ohio River, what is now almost entirely urbanized. If it seems amazing that there are coyotes in the city limits, let alone foxes, deer, and other quadrupeds, imagine processions of American buffalo, the Bison bison, which can sometimes weigh up to two thousand pounds and more, crossing the Falls of the Ohio onto the floodplains on which downtown is built, grazing a landscape that has been completely transformed and lost.
A number of years ago, I saw my first indication of the buffalo’s former presence at the junction of South Shelby Street and South Preston Street, in Parkway Village, at the edge of Shuffitt’s Automotive lot where the Preston Highway begins. There, a tall banner, resembling a stretched animal hide, towers over the lot. On it, drivers can see representations of two adult buffalo and a calf. Several local news outfits reported on this project of the Saint Joseph’s Area Association, which raised money for a number of years—two thousand dollars in all—to create an artwork that will commemorate the fact that the Preston Highway is the original buffalo trail, more commonly called a “trace.”
I’d lived in my house in Germantown for over half a decade before I discovered this fact: the bison, an animal we usually historically associate with the Great Plains, once migrated within less than a mile from my home.
I don’t know of many people who retain an historical memory of the bison, and even the land itself seems to have forgotten them. If there is one place, though, that the buffalo remains, even as a kind of ghost, it is in our roads.
The plains bison, B. b. bison, one of the subspecies of the American bison, once roamed a massive territory on the continent, extending from the high plains of Saskatchewan to the Gulf of Mexico, and from the deserts of the Great Basin to the Blue Ridge Mountains. All of Kentucky, as well as most of its neighboring states, fall entirely within this historic bison range. It’s impossible to ascertain the numbers that were in Kentucky—though some reports suggest smaller herds, nothing quite like the enormous herds of the plains—but the estimation of the animals in the late nineteenth century, by then relegated to the Great Plains, was about 60 million buffalo. By 1889, following the astounding mass killings of the bison—a campaign of terror waged against the Plains Indians, destroying not only their primary food source but their spirit animal—the number dwindled to 541.
Bison are migratory animals, and in our region they moved between the prairies of what is now Illinois and Indiana to the salt licks of Kentucky, the main ones being just south of Louisville, along the Salt River. The paths they blazed between each place were probably used for thousands of years (many think they were pounded out by prehistoric mastodons), so worn and easy to navigate that they were followed by the early indigenous people and, later, by pioneers emigrating from Virginia. The Cumberland Gap was one such route, and the Wilderness Road followed much of it, too. Today, we drive our cars atop routes the buffalo pioneered.
John Brickell
From The Natural History of North Carolina (depiction of a buffalo)
I was in the Bullitt County History Museum in Shepherdsville, researching a number of abandoned roads in the area—the Courthouse Road, which connected the Salt River and Elizabethtown, and the old stagecoach road, the Louisville-Nashville Turnpike—when one of the volunteers asked me if I knew about the buffalo trace. He showed me an article by Robert McDowell, published in 1967 in Louisville Magazine, which describes the route of the Wilderness Road, which ended in Louisville.
McDowell studied documents from the courthouses of Louisville and Shepherdsville, and the archives of the Filson Club, and began to reconstruct the route of the Wilderness Road, famous, of course, for Daniel Boone’s initial blazing of the path through the Cumberland Gap in 1775, which followed Thomas Walker’s exploration a quarter century before that. Even earlier, the longhunters were following this path that was used by the Cherokee and, before that, not only the bison but likely mastodons. It remains one of the oldest paths in the country.
The Wilderness Road was improved in 1796, with money from the Kentucky legislature, but was abandoned by 1840. In his article, McDowell writes that a major buffalo trace extended southward from the Falls of the Ohio to Bullitt’s Lick, which lies just north of the Salt River. “The pioneers claimed that buffalo could layout a road as well as any man,” he wrote, and it was that very buffalo trace that developed into the northern track of the Wilderness Road.
Later I found an earlier article McDowell had written for the Courier-Journal Magazine in 1962. A number of early pioneers, he wrote, were summoned by the Bullitt Circuit Court in 1811 to show the county surveyor where the original Wilderness Road had run. Those original depositions and surveys were filed away in the courthouse, forgotten for a century and a half, until McDowell began to research them. He mentions, here again, that the end of the Wilderness Road followed the original buffalo trace. In fact, there were a number of these traces, he wrote, “converging on Bullitt’s Lick like spokes.”
Squire Boone once killed a buffalo at Bullitt’s Lick, three miles west of Shepherdsville, in the spring of 1779. The Saltworks founded at the lick that same year are long gone, and the original trace once used to transport salt to Louisville was abandoned. I set out to follow the route myself, from the Ohio River to Bullitt’s Lick, to see, best I could, how our settlement has changed it.
The buffalo trace seems to have begun, once it had crossed the Ohio, at the Kentucky & Indiana Terminal Railroad Bridge, west of the Falls of the Ohio, at the entrance to the McAlpine Locks. If this is the case—and I am tracing McDowell’s map from the Courier-Journal piece—it seems to have followed the banks, past the modern canal and through Lannan Park, paralleling Interstate 64, toward downtown.
In his Louisville Magazine article, McDowell says the buffalo came fully ashore near where Fort Nelson once stood, along Main Street on Museum Row, then banked southward toward the courthouse, cutting across Jefferson Square Park and following what is today Armory Place, picking up where Fifth Street gently bends toward Fourth Street, turning again somewhere in the vicinity of St. Catherine through Old Louisville. The square grid tends to hide the route, but once the trace meets Preston Street, one begins to see how the track trended southward in graceful curves.
Less than a mile from my house, I parked my car on East Burnett Avenue, near the warehouse of a metal fabricator, and walked back to Preston Street. The railroad, the CSX line, cuts Preston in half here, and Interstate 65 roars overhead. North of this intersection, Preston Street runs in a straight line, almost directly north toward downtown and the river. But southward, the road veers from this line and begins to meander toward the southeast, and it’s this portion that the buffalo trace most accurately follows.
From there, continuing south, the commercialization along the route is all too familiar, the Kentucky Fried Chicken, the McDonald’s, the Aldi, as well as the fairgrounds, the airport, and further on, the landfill. South of the Watterson Expressway, the trace immediately passes the new Amazon warehouse and Male High School. Soon it begins crossing the ditches—Greasy Ditch, Spring Ditch, the Northern and Southern Ditch—on the way to Fern Creek, Okolona. Two hundred years ago, this area was dominated by the “wet woods,” a marshy forest where thieves lurked—even today, along the interstate, you can see the flooding in those woods, a remnant of ecological history. Along Preston, you’re more likely to note the car lots, auto parts dealers, shopping centers, restaurants, smoke shops and liquor stores. Many of the buildings are boarded up, empty, the lots overgrown with weeds.
I parked in a lot by the Rent-A-Center and walked back along the highway—there is no sidewalk, only grass—to see the Northern Ditch. It was hard to imagine the landscape from two or three hundred years ago, what it might have looked like as a marshy area that these ditches eventually drained.
On the corner of Blue Lick Road and Preston Highway, I stopped to look for the historical marker that stood on this location, marking the Wilderness Road. I couldn’t find it. I later learned that during recent road construction, it was taken down, if temporarily. It tells of the thousands of pioneers that traveled the road from 1775 to 1811, its fashioning into a wagon road by an act of the legislature in 1796, before being abandoned in 1840. “It followed ancient buffalo path,” it reads.
From this corner, the trace follows Blue Lick Road, curving like a country lane toward the Gene Snyder Freeway and beyond, toward the small municipality of Hunters Hollow, and crossing the headwaters of Brooks Run. At Highway 1526, I turned west at the Subway and Comfort Inn and crossed over the interstate, and at the Pilot truck stop, continued south on East Blue Lick Road, past new warehouse facilities and an LG&E substation, crossing first Clear Run then the railroad tracks. I drove a short distance south on Coral Ridge Road, then turned west onto West Blue Lick Road, crossing Bluelick Creek and headed into the Blue Lick Gap, where even more thieves once hid.
This stretch, when viewed from a map, is clearly a wandering trail. The road becomes Chillicoop and then Raymond Road, crossing Gravel Creek and Bullitt Lick Creek before finally gliding down to Shepherdsville Road, Highway 44, and the location of what was once Bullitt’s Lick.
At the Lick, there is a historical marker beside a fence, detailing its discovery by Captain Thomas Bullitt in 1773, and that the commercial production of salt here provided for settlements in Kentucky and even as far as the Illinois Country. Behind the fence are rows of household appliances—stoves, refrigerators, washers and dryers—where, through an open gate, I could see what looked like a marsh. Perhaps that was the lick. I knocked on the door of the house that stood there. No one answered.
Across the highway, Cahaz Knob looms over a small Baptist church—a beacon as much for the bison as me. From there, the trace apparently followed the Castleman Branch Road south toward the headwaters of Woodland Creek, and ultimately into Fort Knox and the banks of the Salt River.
To the northwest, the buffalo trace reached to the Wabash River, to Vincennes, on what is generally known as the Vincennes Trace. It was sometimes known as the Old Indian Road, and certainly the Shawnee would have used it. It is said to have been twenty feet wide in places.
It generally follows U.S. 150 from Floyds Knobs on the highway designated as one of “Indiana’s Historic Pathways,” the signs on the shoulder illustrated with a buffalo. Along the way, too, there is ample evidence of people’s familiarity with what the route once was—the statue of a buffalo in a schoolyard, more signs, the Buffalo Trace Park at the edge of Palmyra where there is one preserved stretch of the actual trace. I’ve driven the stretch through Greenville, Fredericksburg, Paoli, Loogootee, all the way to Vincennes, to the Lincoln monument on the far side of the river in Illinois. I thought, when my third great-grandfather, Henry Henson, joined the Indiana infantry during the Civil War, he followed this route from French Lick to Louisville, before continuing on to the Battle of Perryville. He’s buried up there, outside French Lick, not far from the trace itself.
The buffalo traces, McDowell wrote, were present when long hunters roamed Kentucky. “Woodsman after woodsman deposed that the buffalo had made no new roads within his experience,” he wrote. “Apparently these game trails had endured for centuries, perhaps for thousands of years.” What does it mean to follow their roads now?
The historian John Filson wrote, “The amazing herds of Buffaloes which resort thither, by their size and number, fill the traveller with amazement and terror, especially when he beholds the prodigious roads they have made from all quarters, as if leading to some populous city…” The buffalo, which he referred to as “cattle,” would “reduce high hills rather to valleys than plains” and that the lands around the salt lick springs were “desolated as if by a ravaging enemy, and hills reduced to plains…these are truly curiosities, and the eye can scarcely be satisfied with admiring them.”
It would be droll to joke of the irony of this statement, when we see what has become of not only the salt licks and the plains but the traces themselves, now beds for our roads through a largely commercial environment. Even the ditches are crossed without a thought, the wet woods sped through on the morning commute. Waiting at the light, where Preston intersects Burnett, even I am locked into the present, my attention drifting between the passing trucks and the passing train and the homeless camps beneath the overpass. This is what our roads pass by now, and what passes on our roads. It’s what passes for our roads.
Why, then, is it important to know this? To know that once such an animal as the bison carved a path that we found useful to follow? Perhaps there is another way to follow, a way we have not yet imagined. We might, traveling there, hold the buffalo in our mind. We might imagine it knows where we are going. Like it, we too carve deep ruts, both in the earth and in our minds and behaviors. It will take effort to find a new road, but should we find it, it might lead us somewhere utterly new.
