It is eminently proper that the metropolis of "Jackson's Purchase" should bear a name of Indian origin. Although the greater part of Kentucky, with its fertile meadowlands, towering forests, and tangled cane-brakes, was only the hunting ground of the red men, yet all that territory in Kentucky and Tennessee lying between the Tennessee and Mississippi rivers was the home of the Chickasaw Indians. This large tribe had their main town at Chickasaw Bluffs, where Memphis now stands, with a number of other settlements scattered throughout this seven million acres of fertile lands.

As Kentucky was once a part of Virginia, and as the "Old Dominion" was a British colony, this section was once claimed by Great Britain. After the Revolutionary War, Virginia, relying on the former policy of the mother country, that,

allowed George Rogers Clark, in recognition of his services in the Northwest Territory, to enter several thousand acres of land, including the present site of the capital of McCracken County.

At that time there were no white settlements in this section; but as early as the year 1806 or 1807 there was a flatboat landing and woodyard at the mouth of the Tennessee River, kept by a genial Irishman named Pat Dugan. The first name given the place, and the one by which it was known for many years, was Pekin.

On October 19, 1818, through Governor Isaac Shelby and General Andrew Jackson, commissioners, the United States bought from the Chickasaw Indians their tract referred to above, which in the present state of Kentucky includes the counties of Ballard, Calloway, Carlisle, Fulton, Graves, Hickman, Marshall, and McCracken.

For many years the hero of Kaskasia, Cahokia, and Vincennes had been infirm and poor. We all remember the touching scene when the Virginia commission presented him a sword in recognition of his great services to the United States; the old soldier listened in gloomy silence for a while and, finally, thrusting the sword into the ground and breaking it, he exclaimed, "When Virginia needed a sword I found one. Now I want bread!" By the treaty just mentioned the title of George Rogers Clark was made clear, but as he had died a few months previous to this his tract passed to his brother, General William Clark, of St. Louis, who had accompanied Meriwether Lewis on the noted Lewis and Clark Expedition.

A few years after, General William Clark came to the little town of Pekin accompanied by an Indian chief who had become a friend of his while on his Western trip.

In Jefferson's "Notes on Virginia," he speaks of a tribe of Indians called "Paducahs." In the "Handbook of American Indians" we find that the "Paducahs" belonged to the warlike Comanches, this being the name given them by the Spaniards. There is in Texas a small town of about one thousand five hundred inhabitants, named Paducah from this tribe of Indians.

Paducah, Kentucky, is named, not from the tribe, but from an individual Indian. In his diary of the Lewis and Clark Expedition, General William Clark speaks more than once of the kindness shown his party by a scattered branch of the Paducahs, and of how their chief became his friend. Dr. Catlin tells, in speaking of the tribes of the West, of a chief of the Mandans, Indians that often intermarried with the Comanches, named "Paducheyeh," meaning "tall or upstanding chestnut tree." Whether or not he was the one who became the friend of General Clark we do not know, but when the Comanches came southward, their old chief, called Paducah, went to St. Louis, and then came with General Clark on a visit to the town of Pekin, where he died with fever, and was buried near Third Street just beyond Tennessee.

A log cabin was placed around his grave, and pioneer residents have told of a party of Indians coming from beyond the Mississippi and holding ceremonies over Paducah's grave. These were Comanches, or to use their tribal name, Paducahs.

Whether the individual name of the old chief who had befriended General Clark was one of the many varied spellings of Paducah, or whether General Clark called him by his tribal name instead, we know not. Yet there was a real chief in recognition of whose kindness the "Pride of the Pennyrile" was named Paducah.