Event: MAY 1773, Thomas Bullitt asks Shawnee for Kentucky Bullitt

• General Notes
  • http://www.usdoj.gov/osg/aboutosg/bullittbio.htm
    
    Bethal Church of God Web Site [99].
    In May of 1773, Thomas Bullitt met with the Chalahgawtha sept of the Shawnee Indians. His purpose was to negotiate peace on behalf of Lord Dunmore, the white father of Virginia. Bullitt asked Chief Black Fish, the Shawnee chief, for settlements south of the Ohio River in the country know as Can-tuc-kee. Black Fish told Bullitt:
    The Shawnees cannot tell you that you are allowed to settle in the Can-tuc-kee lands. We have never owned that land. It belongs to the ghosts of the murdered Azgens—a white people from the eastern sea. Their bones and ghosts own and occupy every hill and valley of the country. They protect the game there and have more and better right there than any of the Indian tribes, including our own Shawnee nation, because they do not need or use material food themselves and do not like it. Long ago our fathers and our grandfathers killed off the Azgens, but we now fear more the spirits of these people than our fathers and grandfathers feared them when they were flesh. When our food is all gone and our squaws and children starving, we appeal to the ghosts of the white mothers who were killed there, and by saying the right words, we are allowed to kill an elk or deer or bear or buffalo. But, we are never allowed to kill the game wantonly and we are forbidden to settle in the country of Can-tuc-kee. If we did, these ghosts would not rise from their caves and mounds and slay us, but they would set father against son and son against father and neighbor against neighbor and make them kill one another (Eckert, 70–74).
    In a footnote Eckert postulates that these Azgens may have been the remnants of Sir Walter Raleigh’s lost colony of Roanoke, which disappeared without a trace in 1587.