Kentucky's Jackson Purchase is the Land at the Center of America

If you look at a map of state of Kentucky, you will notice that while it is wide north to south in the east, its western end narrows down to nearly a point. The westernmost part of Kentucky is called "The Purchase" or "The Jackson Purchase".

"The Purchase" is named for a treaty signed by Andrew Jackson.

The Jackson Purchase gets its name from an 1818 treaty between the Chickasaw Indians and a party of negotiators headed by General Andrew Jackson. The tribe was regarded as having the fiercest warriors in the American South, but they had a long term trading relationship with settlers in South Carolina.

Leaders of the Chickasaw Nation took pride in avoiding war with white Americans and no doubt saw their land would soon be overtaken by the tide of settlement. They agreed to the treaty to get the best deal then possible, $300,000 payable over 15 years, as well as payments to some of the chiefs. Chickasaws retained their lands in north Mississippi until they were eventually forced to settle in Oklahoma in 1837.

The Mississippi River and its tributaries nearly encircle the region.

The rivers were a major avenue long before any Europeans arrived in America, and ancestors of today's tribal groups built earthen mounds at many places including west Kentucky, especially at Wickliffe near the confluence of the Mississippi and Ohio Rivers. These "Mound Builders" lived in mostly permanent farming settlements and flourished for a thousand years or longer.

The treaty of 1818 purchased land between the Tennessee River and the Mississippi River and included the western third of the state of Tennessee, though in that state the region is generally referred to simply as "West Tennessee". The Kentucky portion is 2394 square miles in area, a little larger than the state of Delaware.

Western Kentucky is 200 miles west of the Appalachian Mountains (as well as 60 miles east of Missouri's Ozark Plateau) and is nearly flat to gently rolling countryside. It is a region dominated by the great arterial rivers that drain much of North America. Streaming in from the south is the Tennessee River closely paralleled by the Cumberland River a few miles to the east. Both empty into the Ohio River increasing its volume just 40 miles before it unites with the Mississippi River. The bluffs overlooking the Mississippi such as those at Hickman and Columbus, Kentucky are the greatest changes in elevation in the Purchase.

The Purchase is part of the Gulf Coastal Plain.

Besides lacking hills, the Purchase area has almost no outcrops of bedrock. The land was actually part of the Gulf of Mexico until 40 million years ago, recent in geologic terms. You would have to drill through several hundred feet of clay, sand, and gravel to reach solid bedrock. Though 500 miles from the Gulf of Mexico, the Purchase area is only about 500 feet above sea level, making it a northern extension of the Gulf coastal plain. While much of the Purchase was heavily forested, some areas in the central part of the region were known as "The Barrens" since they were meadow lands with scattered trees.

The land was not always quiet. In 1811 and 1812 some of the most powerful earthquakes ever reported, thought to be greater than 8 on the Richter scale, in North America racked the New Madrid Fault, just a few miles west of the Mississippi River. Lesser quakes occurred in 1843 and 1895 and occasional startle residents today.

Removal of the Chickasaw Nation opened the region for settlement by the 1820s, the last section of Kentucky to be settled. Central Kentucky, the Bluegrass Region around Lexington, had been occupied 50 years earlier during the Revolutionary War when warfare with Indians and their British allies had nearly destroyed the earliest settlements soon after they were born.

However, when the Jackson Purchase was settled, Indian warfare in Kentucky was two generations in the past. Steamboats were becoming commonplace on the rivers, and the frontier had moved to distant Texas or even more distant Oregon Country