[From _The Centenary of Louisville_ (Louisville, Kentucky, 1893)]
In the year 1808, while digging the foundation of the great flouring
mill of the Tarascons in that part of Louisville known as
Shippingport, it became necessary to remove a large sycamore tree, the
trunk of which was six feet in diameter, and the roots of which
penetrated the earth for forty feet around. Under the center of the
trunk of this tree was found an iron hatchet, which was so guarded by
the base and roots that no human hand could have placed it there
after the tree grew. It must have occupied the spot where it was found
when the tree began to grow. The hatchet was made by bending a flat
bar of iron around a cylinder until the two ends met, and then welding
them together and hammering them to a cutting edge, leaving a round
hole at the bend for a handle. The annulations of this tree were two
hundred in number, thus showing it to be two hundred years old
according to the then mode of computation. Here was a find which
proved to be a never-ending puzzle to the early scientists of the
Falls of the Ohio. The annulations of this tree made it two hundred
years old, and so fixed the date earlier than any white man or user of
iron was known to have been at the falls. One thought that Moscoso,
the successor of De Soto, in his wanderings up the Mississippi and
Missouri rivers, might have entered the Ohio and left the hatchet
there in 1542; another, that it might have come from the Spaniards who
settled St. Augustine in 1565; another, that the Spaniards who went up
the Ohio in 1669 in search of silver might have left it where it was
found; and another, that Marquette, when he discovered the Upper
Mississippi in 1673, or La Salle, when he sailed down to its mouth in
1682, might have given the hatchet to an Indian, who left it at the
Falls. But from these reasonable conjectures their learning and
imagination soon led these savants into the wildest theories and
conjectures. One thought that the Northmen, whom the Sagas of
Sturleson made discoverers of America in the eleventh century, had
brought the hatchet to this country; another, that Prince Madoc, who
left a principality in Wales in the twelfth century for a home in the
western wilderness, might have brought it here; and another, that it
might have been brought here by those ancient Europeans whom Diodorus
and Pausanius and other classical writers assure us were in
communication with this country in ancient times. One of these learned
ethnologists finally went so far as to advance the theory of the
Egyptian priests, as related by Plato, that the autochthons of our
race brought it here before the Island of Atlantis, lying between
Europe and America, went down in the ocean and cut off all further
communication between the continents.
This hatchet, however, really furnished no occasion for such strained
conjectures and wild speculations. If the sycamore under which it was
found was two hundred years old, as indicated by its annulations, it
must have begun to grow about the time that Jamestown in Virginia and
Quebec in Canada were founded. It would have been no unreasonable act
for an Indian or white man to have brought this hatchet from the English
on the James, or from the French on the St. Lawrence, to the Falls of
the Ohio in 1608, just two hundred years before it was discovered by
removing the tree that grew over it. The known habit of the sycamore,
however, to make more than one annulation in years particularly
favorable to growth suggests that two hundred annulations do not
necessarily mean that many years. If we allow about fifty per cent of
the life of the tree to have been during years exceptionally favorable
to its growth, and assign double annulations to these favorable years,
we shall have this tree to have made its two hundred annulations in
about one hundred and thirty-nine years, and to have sprung from its
seed and to have begun its growth about the year 1669 or 1670, when La
Salle, the great French explorer, is believed to have been at the Falls
of the Ohio. We have no account of any one at the Falls in 1608, or
about this time, to support the conjecture that it might have come from
Jamestown or Quebec; but we have La Salle at this place in 1669 or 1670,
and it is not unreasonable that he should have left it here at that
time. In this sense the old rusty hatchet, which is fortunately
preserved, becomes interesting to us all for its connection with the
discovery of Louisville. It is a souvenir of the first white man who
ever saw the Falls of the Ohio. It is a memento of Robert Cavalier de La
Salle, the discoverer of the site of the city of Louisville.