Free Bourbon Empire by Reid Mitenbuler Page B

was a place of transition, new and unknown. To many, even the state’s name was a mystery. The Cherokee said it meant “dark and bloody ground,” but the Iroquois’s interpretation of
Kanta-ke
translated to “meadow-land.” The Wyandote interpreted it as “the land of tomorrow,” while the Shawnee claimed it meant “at the head of the river.” Others said it was simply a name invented by white people.
    The frontiersmen who had lived in Kentucky before the arrival of Craig and the Travelling Church were equally confounding. Most were fringe-dwelling loners like the Scotch-Irish distillers who had protected Washington’s flank during the war—hunters more than gatherers. Theywore buckskin and during their odd visits back east spoke of killing Indians. Hector St. John de Crèvecoeur, a New Yorker who originally hailed from France, described them as “no better than carnivorous animals” that “exhibit the most hideous parts of our society.” It would still be decades before a club of writers known as the Knickerbocker Group—including James Fenimore Cooper and Washington Irving—would reimagine these backwoodsmen as a cast of heroic American originals.
    The arrival of Craig and the Travelling Church, however, was the result of an earlier phase of Kentucky’s image makeover. Crèvecoeur and others had claimed that the frontier needed proper farmers to introduce social bonds and civilization. The idea of Manifest Destiny was in its infancy, and Jefferson’s objective to create a rural democracy was just taking root. In 1779, when the future president was governor of Virginia, of which Kentucky was a part until its statehood in 1792, he enticed people like Craig to move by giving away free land if it was used to grow corn.
    People started to trickle in, but many were still fearful. What the frontier really needed to attract settlers was the right spokesperson. Enter Daniel Boone, who had moved to the frontier when he was scrappy and poor, then fought Indians there during the Revolution. Later he would win public office and become a Freemason, making Boone the ultimate bootstrapper, embodying the frontier’s potential. Then, when he was fifty years old, he became a living legend when the historian John Filson published
The Discovery, Settlement and Present State of Kentucke
in 1784
.
Filson colorfully chronicled Boone’s adventures, glossing over certain details—part of the reason Boone chose to live in the frontier was to avoid debt collectors (which he later repaid)—and often taking spectacular liberties with other parts of Boone’s epic and inspiring story. *
    It was mythmaking at its best. Other writers with purple pens happily joined Filson’s effort to glamorize the frontier and attract quasi-nomadic dreamers like Craig, Elijah Pepper, Henry Wathen, JacobBoehm (later changed to Beam), and others whose names would, many decades later, eventually lend inspiration to bourbon brands. These writers gushed that Kentucky was a place where a settler only needed to work “scarcely two hours a day to support himself and his family.” One writer even called heaven “a Kentucky sort of place.” The historian Daniel Blake later wrote that Boone’s Kentucky was “first and perhaps foremost, an idea. It was an idea born of need and hope.”
    Once Craig and his Travelling Church arrived in Kentucky, they founded a town called Lebanon, borrowing the name for what the Old Testament called the “land of milk and honey” (in 1790, the name was changed to Georgetown, to honor the first U.S. president). The group soon learned that the region was also a perfect kitchen for making whiskey. Each hill on the Kentucky horizon was a paler blue echo of the one before, the rolling topography resisting erosion and creating bottomlands with soil so rich that one settler compared it to black butter. From the very beginning, the bottomlands were legendary for growing corn. Hierosme Lalemant, a Jesuit missionary living in