Who was the first "white man" to visit the Lake Cumberland region? It's a little far in the past to be certain, and certainly there were few records kept of the individual journeys of regular citizens not travelling in an organized expedition. However, there are records of one individual which indicates he may have been the first.

From an historical highway marker in Washingtonboro, PA: Martin Chartier Died 1718 Noted Indian Trader and Interpreter In early Pennsylvania and Maryland Frenchman from Canada Who resided At Fort St. Louis Of the Sieur de la Salle In present Illinois 1684-1690 A leader thence of the Shawnee Indians To Maryland 1692 and to Susquehanna River At Pequea Creek now Lancaster County Pennsylvannia 1697 Agent in William Penn's treaties With the indians of the Susquehanna Settler here in later years At the site of Washington Borough On a 300 acre tract Granted to him by Penn Father by his Shawnee wife of Peter Chartier The indian trader & interpreter Erected by The Pennsylvania Commission And the Lancaster County Historical Society 1925

His name was Martin Chartier, and the year he visited the land that would become the lake region was likely 1691, over three hundred years ago.

It was a period of time in which the French were carrying on extensive explorations in what was then the American "west." Marquette and Joliet travelled down the Mississippi River to the mouth of the Arkansas River in 1673. After returning to Quebec the next year, Joliet drew a map of their journey. On it, he placed a river that may have been the Cumberland, and noted a large village of Shawnee near it.

Though Joliet had not visited the area himself, and had learned of it from Native Americans encountered on their journey, he did establish the first non-native name for what would eventually be the Cumberland River. Later French cartographers, likely using his information as a guideline, labeled the stream the Riviere des Chauouanons — the River of the Shawnee.

The Shawnee were not native to the region, being a northern tribe that had been forced from their homelands. However, such was their number at the time that the river continued to be called the Chauouanon, the Shawnee River, by white men for many years.

(A later French map of 1684, based on explorations by Rene Robert Cavalier, Sieur de La Salle, shows a river that is most likely the Cumberland. On this map it is labeled both Riviere Bleu and Skipaki-cipi. The latter appears to be a native name for the river; if so, it is the only native name for the stream that survives in record.)

French traders took the lead in the discovery, exploration and exploitation of the new frontier. They called themselves coureurs de bois — wood runners. It was these sturdy Frenchmen who challenged the wilderness with gusto, hunting and trading and trapping, often joining with the natives and taking native wives. They were men who liked the wild, free life. Such a man was Martin Chartier.

Harriet Simpson Arnow relates the escapades of Chartier in her monumental volume of historical reconstruction, Seedtime On The Cumberland. Drawn from several sources, the references she researched provide a reasonably detailed account of Chartier's experiences, and it is the first relatively well-documented visit of a non-native to the Lake Cumberland region.

Genesis of his journeys

A Canadian carpenter turned wood-runner, Chartier had worked for several years for the master trader La Salle at Niagara Falls, building a fort and a large sailing vessel for use on the Great Lakes. By this time he had already taken a native wife, most likely a Shawnee, who had born him at least one daughter. Chartier was still working for La Salle by 1680, when the trader suffered a major financial misfortune in the sinking of his ship with a rich load aboard.

By this time, it was said, that many of the men in La Salle's employ — Chartier among them — had not been paid for up to three years. Many of the men took it upon themselves to get their pay, and absconded with a quantity of supplies which they considered due them is lieu of the missing salary. However, La Salle considered it theft, and most of the accused were captured.

Not so Chartier, who escaped with eight others in the summer of 1680 to the Dutch territory of New York, where he lived for a spell. For some reason he returned to Canada, where he was captured, and "put into irons." He managed to escape to the Illinois country — a dangerous move because it was under the control of La Salle. It was likely that Chartier had reunited with his wife, and was recorded as wandering for six years with a band of Shawnee.

As noted earlier, the tribe had been chased from their ancestral lands and were often on the move, finding it safer to continue wandering that risk the wrath of the neighboring Chickasaw and Cherokee to the south. However, a small group of Cherokee reportedly lead them to the Cumberland River region, where they spent several years relatively unmolested.

Chartier had been away when the tribe headed south, but later followed them. In August 1690, he "took a canoe and went after them three hundred leagues in forty days," following their trail. When he finally caught up with the band, "they made him very welcome." He spent the next two years living along the Cumberland River with them, pausing in one place long enough to raise a crop of corn.

Most historians agree that this longer last settlement on the Cumberland was in the region that is now Lake Cumberland. Arnow, in Seedtime, notes that Chartier's 300-league trip (about 900 miles) would have taken him far up the Cumberland, and surmises "they possibly spent most of their time on the stretch of river between Obey's (River, which is just across the state line in Tennessee) and the Big South Fork (of the Cumberland." She noted that game would have been plentiful, and they were about as far from potential enemies as they could get.

The following year, Chartier and the Shawnee band (numbering 72 warriors, 120 women and children and several Cherokee prisoners) moved out of the area and on to Maryland, where they were recorded being in 1692. Their unlikely and wild appearance alarmed the settlers in the countryside, and Chartier was placed in the St. Mary jail, suspected of being a French spy.

Some months later he was released, and again joined his Shawnee band, who had by then become accepted. He soon moved upriver into Pennsylvania where he set up shop as a trader with Native Americans.

Even after settling in the east, he continued to make trips back into the wilderness. An expedition near what is now Washington D.C. in 1712 found a Frenchman "named Martin Chartier, who had married an Indian woman." The man told of journeys into the wilderness to look for mines, and then lodged with the group for a spell, "treating them after the Indian fashion."

Martin Chartier was not the only wood-runner to have travelled much of the continent's interior during those years. He is, however, the only one who in a fashion left a record of his exploits — the others were too busy hunting, trapping, and living the untamed life of the wilderness to bother with what later men might think of them.