Paducah's Indian Name
Paducah, McCracken County, Kentucky
Marker Inscription
Paducah's Indian Name. Paducah, only major Kentucky city with an Indian name, was named in honor of legendary Indian Chief Paduke by Gen. William Clark when he platted town in 1827. Village was first named Pekin. The Paducahs, Chief Paduke's sub-tribe of Chickasaw Indians, had lived and hunted in this area until land was taken by Jackson Purchase in 1818. Presented in Memory of Lee Anna Rhodes. Presented by James Rhodes.
Erected by Kentucky Historical Society
The Story
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.
Why it matters
The name marks both the long Indigenous presence along the lower Ohio and the sweeping land cessions that opened western Kentucky to American settlement.
The story behind this marker
AI contextThe era
This marker carries you back to the Early Republic, when the far western edge of Kentucky was only just passing from Indigenous homeland into American town. For generations, Native peoples had lived and hunted across this land at the lower reaches of the Ohio, long before any grid of streets was imagined here.
The great turning point named on the marker is the Jackson Purchase of 1818, the treaty by which the Chickasaw ceded their claim to this corner of the country. With that cession, western Kentucky was opened to American settlement — and a landscape that had been lived in one way for centuries began, very quickly, to be surveyed, platted, and sold in another.
The town that rose here in the years just after is a product of that exact moment: American settlement pressing westward onto land only recently ceded, and taking, as it did so, a name that pointed back to the people who had been displaced.
People & events
By the marker's account, this area had been home to the Paducahs — described as Chief Paduke's group associated with the Chickasaw — who lived and hunted here until the 1818 cession took the land. The town itself was first laid out under the name Pekin.
Everything changed in 1827, when General William Clark platted the town. This is the same William Clark of the famed Lewis and Clark expedition, who in his later years served as a leading federal official in Indian affairs in the West — which makes his hand in naming this place all the more resonant. He set aside the name Pekin and chose instead to honor Chief Paduke, and so the town became Paducah.
It is worth being honest about what we can and cannot know here. The marker itself calls Paduke a "legendary" chief, and the details of his life are exactly the kind of thing the historical record leaves genuinely uncertain. What is solid is the naming: the deliberate choice, at the town's founding, to carry forward an Indigenous name rather than the borrowed "Pekin."
Its place in the American story
Paducah's name marks a tension that runs straight through the American story. The same decades that saw Indigenous nations pressured into vast land cessions also saw the newcomers reach back for Native names to christen the towns, counties, and rivers they built on that ceded ground. The honoring and the displacing happened together, and this place holds both at once.
That this is described as the only major Kentucky city bearing an Indigenous name makes it a rare and pointed example. Across the nation, Native names are everywhere on the map — but the act of choosing one, consciously, at a town's founding, is a small window into how nineteenth-century Americans thought about the land they were settling and the peoples they had displaced from it.
The presence of William Clark in the story only deepens it. A figure so tied to American westward expansion, platting a town on newly ceded land and naming it for a Native chief, embodies the whole complicated inheritance of the frontier — expansion and memory bound together in a single word on a sign.
If you visit
Stand here and try to hold two timescales at once: the long centuries in which Native peoples lived and hunted along the lower Ohio, and the sudden, fast-moving decades after 1818 when the town was surveyed and named. The marker asks you to remember both, and the place feels richer when you do.
Say the city's name to yourself and let it register as what it is — a deliberate act of naming from 1827, a word chosen over the plainer "Pekin." It's easy to drive past a familiar place-name without hearing it; this is a spot that invites you to actually listen to one.
Approach it thoughtfully. The history here includes both an honored name and the loss that lies behind it, and the honest visitor holds those together rather than smoothing them over. It makes a fitting stop on any road trip through the region — a reminder that even a city's name can carry a whole chapter of American history.
Written by AI to add context, grounded in the marker’s inscription and the historical record. The inscription above is the original, unaltered text.
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Related people
- · Chief Paduke
- · Gen. William Clark
Related events
- · Jackson Purchase, 1818
Themes & tags
Nearby & related markers
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.
Jackson Purchase
McCracken County, KY
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.
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.
Mantle Rock
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During the brutal winter of 1838-1839, Cherokee people forced from their Smoky Mountain homelands toward Oklahoma sheltered beneath Mantle Rock, a 40-foot sandstone arch, while the ice-choked Ohio River halted ferry crossings. Many died there waiting to cross. Long before that tragedy, the arch had also sheltered ancient Indigenous people who camped at the site.