Jackson Purchase
McCracken County, McCracken County, Kentucky
Marker Inscription
Jackson Purchase. 8,500 square mile area, former tribal lands of Chickasaw Indians. United States paid $300,000 for tract in 1818 after negotiations by General Andrew Jackson and Governor Isaac Shelby. Bordered by Tennessee, Ohio and Mississippi Rivers, now comprises Kentucky's eight and Tennessee's twenty westernmost counties.
Erected by Kentucky Historical Society
The Story
In 1818, the young United States acquired an 8,500-square-mile wedge of land between the Tennessee, Ohio, and Mississippi Rivers from the Chickasaw Nation for $300,000, in a treaty brokered by General Andrew Jackson and Kentucky Governor Isaac Shelby. Known ever after as the Jackson Purchase, the tract opened westernmost Kentucky and Tennessee to American settlement. Its clean river boundaries still define the region's eight Kentucky and twenty Tennessee counties.
Why it matters
The Jackson Purchase is a textbook case of how treaty and payment—not just war—reshaped the map of the early republic, transferring ancestral Chickasaw homelands into the expanding American frontier.
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Related people
- · Andrew Jackson
- · Isaac Shelby
Related events
- · Jackson Purchase (1818)
Themes & tags
Nearby & related markers
Paducah's Indian Name
Paducah, KY
Paducah is the only major Kentucky city bearing an Indigenous name, honoring the legendary Chief Paduke. His people, a group associated with the Chickasaw, lived and hunted in this area until their land was ceded in the 1818 Jackson Purchase. When General William Clark—of Lewis and Clark fame—platted the town in 1827, he set aside its earlier name, Pekin, in favor of Paducah.
Lewis & Clark in McCracken County
Paducah, KY
In November 1803, as Lewis and Clark led the nucleus of the Corps of Discovery down the Ohio River toward their rendezvous with the West, they passed through what is now McCracken County. Camping near present-day Paducah and stopping at Fort Massac just across the river in Illinois, they recruited men for the journey, including the skilled interpreter George Drouillard. Years later, in 1827, William Clark returned to establish the town of Paducah itself.
Paducah, Kentucky
McCracken County, KY
Where the Tennessee River meets the Ohio, William Clark—of Lewis and Clark fame—laid out the town of Paducah in 1827, giving it a name tied to the Chickasaw and their remembered chief Paduke. The rivers and, later, the railroads made it a busy trade center and the seat of McCracken County. It sent Alben Barkley to the vice presidency, produced humorist Irvin S. Cobb, and was seized early in the Civil War by Union generals Lew Wallace and William T. Sherman.
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