Big Bone Lick

BIG BONE LICK, a salt spring in Boone County, Ky., one and one-half miles east of the Ohio River. The earliest known white man to visit this place was Capt. Charles Lemoyne, Baron de Longueuil, who came in 1729.* Christopher Gist visited it in 1751; and in 1773 James Douglas, a Virginia surveyor, described the animal fossils that he found on the surface. Here were found the bones of mastodon, Arctic elephant, and other animals of the glacial epochs. In 1803 and 1806 Dr. William Goforth made a collection of fossils which he entrusted to the English traveler Thomas Ashe. Ashe in turn sold these to the Royal College of Surgeons in London, and to private Irish and Scotch collectors. Thomas Jefferson made a collection of some of the bones, and natural history museums at Lexington, Cincinnati, Philadelphia, and Boston collected the remaining skeletons. The large prehistoric animals were attracted to the Big Bone Lick by the seepage of brine from an underlying basal coal measure. Pioneers found that 500 gallons of this water made one bushel of salt.

Reference: Willard Rouse Jillson, Big Bone Lick: An Outline of its History, Geology and Paleontology, to which is added an annotated Bibliography of 207 titles, (Louisville: The Standard Printing Co., 1936.

Thomas D. Clark

from Dictionary of American History

* Note: This date is incorrect. The trip by the French was not made until 1739. It is uncertain that the party stopped at Big Bone Lick, it was perhaps at some other lick on the Ohio. The first white man we can document was at the Lick was Robert Smith, about 1735, several years before the party of de Longueuil was even in the area.

Big Bone History