Etymology
It is generally accepted that the historic Native American tribes who hunted in what is now Kentucky referred to the region as Catawba, or some similar variant. According to The Kentucky Blue Book, Dragging Canoe, a young Cherokee chief opposed to selling ancestral hunting grounds, warned the whites that they were purchasing a "dark and bloody ground."
The origin of Kentucky's modern name (variously spelled Cane-tuck-ee, Cantucky, Kain-tuck-ee, and Kentuckee before its modern spelling was accepted) comes from an Iroquois word meaning "meadow lands", referring to the buffalo hunting grounds in Central Kentucky's savanna. Members of the Haudenosaunee, the Iroquois Confederacy, were historically based in New York and Pennsylvania. They penetrated to this area of the Ohio River Valley and drove other tribes out in order to control more hunting land. In addition to buffalo, they trapped beaver for the lucrative fur trade with the French and English, long before European-American settlement in this area.
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