In the year 1808, while digging the foundation of the great flouring mill of the Tarascons in that part of Louisville known as Shippingport, it became necessary to remove a large sycamore tree, the trunk of which was six feet in diameter, and the roots of which penetrated the earth for forty feet around. Under the center of the trunk of this tree was found an iron hatchet, which was so guarded by the base and roots that no human hand could have placed it there after the tree grew. It must have occupied the spot where it was found when the tree began to grow. The hatchet was made by bending a flat bar of iron around a cylinder until the two ends met, and then welding them together and hammering them to a cutting edge, leaving a round hole at the bend for a handle. The annulations of this tree were two hundred in number, thus showing it to be two hundred years old according to the then mode of computation. Here was a find which proved to be a never-ending puzzle to the early scientists of the Falls of the Ohio. The annulations of this tree made it two hundred years old, and so fixed the date earlier than any white man or user of iron was known to have been at the falls. One thought that Moscoso, the successor of De Soto, in his wanderings up the Mississippi and Missouri rivers, might have entered the Ohio and left the hatchet there in 1542; another, that it might have come from the Spaniards who settled St. Augustine in 1565; another, that the Spaniards who went up the Ohio in 1669 in search of silver might have left it where it was found; and another, that Marquette, when he discovered the Upper Mississippi in 1673, or La Salle, when he sailed down to its mouth in 1682, might have given the hatchet to an Indian, who left it at the Falls. But from these reasonable conjectures their learning and imagination soon led these savants into the wildest theories and conjectures. One thought that the Northmen, whom the Sagas of Sturleson made discoverers of America in the eleventh century, had brought the hatchet to this country; another, that Prince Madoc, who left a principality in Wales in the twelfth century for a home in the western wilderness, might have brought it here; and another, that it might have been brought here by those ancient Europeans whom Diodorus and Pausanius and other classical writers assure us were in communication with this country in ancient times. One of these learned ethnologists finally went so far as to advance the theory of the Egyptian priests, as related by Plato, that the autochthons of our race brought it here before the Island of Atlantis, lying between Europe and America, went down in the ocean and cut off all further communication between the continents.
This hatchet, however, really furnished no occasion for such strained conjectures and wild speculations. If the sycamore under which it was found was two hundred years old, as indicated by its annulations, it must have begun to grow about the time that Jamestown in Virginia and Quebec in Canada were founded. It would have been no unreasonable act for an Indian or white man to have brought this hatchet from the English on the James, or from the French on the St. Lawrence, to the Falls of the Ohio in 1608, just two hundred years before it was discovered by removing the tree that grew over it. The known habit of the sycamore, however, to make more than one annulation in years particularly favorable to growth suggests that two hundred annulations do not necessarily mean that many years. If we allow about fifty per cent of the life of the tree to have been during years exceptionally favorable to its growth, and assign double annulations to these favorable years, we shall have this tree to have made its two hundred annulations in about one hundred and thirty-nine years, and to have sprung from its seed and to have begun its growth about the year 1669 or 1670, when La Salle, the great French explorer, is believed to have been at the Falls of the Ohio. We have no account of any one at the Falls in 1608, or about this time, to support the conjecture that it might have come from Jamestown or Quebec; but we have La Salle at this place in 1669 or 1670, and it is not unreasonable that he should have left it here at that time. In this sense the old rusty hatchet, which is fortunately preserved, becomes interesting to us all for its connection with the discovery of Louisville. It is a souvenir of the first white man who ever saw the Falls of the Ohio. It is a memento of Robert Cavalier de La Salle, the discoverer of the site of the city of Louisville.
[RICHARD H. COLLINS]
Richard Henry Collins, whom Mr. James Lane Allen has happily christened "the Kentucky Froissart," was born at Maysville, Kentucky, May 4, 1824, over the office of The Eagle. He was the son of Lewis Collins (1797-1870), who published a history of Kentucky in 1847. Richard H. Collins was a Cincinnati lawyer for eleven years, but he lived many years at Maysville, where he edited the old Eagle, which his father had made famous. In 1861 he founded the Danville Review; and in 1874 he published a "revised, enlarged four-fold, and brought down to the year 1874" edition, in two enormous volumes, of his father's history of Kentucky. Unquestionably this is a work of tremendous importance, the most magnificent and elaborate history of this or any other State yet compiled. Traveling the whole State over, obtaining contributions from each town's ablest writer, and then building them upon his father's fine foundation, Collins was able to publish an almost invaluable work. To-day his history of Kentucky, though it certainly contains many errors of various kinds and degrees, is the greatest mine of our State's history which all must explore if they would be informed of our people's past. Dean Shaler and all later Kentucky historical writers have taken pleasure in paying tribute to his work. The one mistake that Collins made, which might have been easily avoided, was to put his manuscripts together in such a manner that the authorship of the various papers cannot be determined; but in this he followed his father's methods; and for this reason the writer has been compelled to reproduce the prefaces of both books, rather than portions of the actual text, for fear he may use matter prepared by a contributor. Collins practiced law in different Kentucky towns, wrote for newspapers and magazines, and spent a very busy and rather active life. He died at the home of his daughter at Maryville, Missouri, on New Year's Day of 1888.
Bibliography. History of Kentucky, by Z. F. Smith (Louisville, 1892); The Blue Grass Region of Kentucky, by James Lane Allen (New York, 1892).
PREFACE TO THE SECOND EDITION
[From History of Kentucky (Covington, Kentucky, 1882, v. ii)]
Twenty-seven years, 1847 to 1874, have elapsed since Collins's History of Kentucky quietly and modestly claimed recognition among the standard local histories in the great American republic. That has been an eventful period. Death, too, has been busy with the names in the Preface above—has claimed alike the author and compiler, Judge Lewis Collins, and about one hundred and fifty more of the honored and substantial names who contributed information or other aid towards preserving what was then unwritten of the history of the State. The author of the present edition (now nearly fifty years of age) is the youngest of the forty-two contributors who are still living; while several of them are over eighty and one is over ninety-two years of age. Time has dealt gently with them; fame has followed some, and fortune others; a few have achieved both fame and fortune, while a smaller few lay claim to neither.