Kentucky's Jackson Purchase was Settled in 1820s and 1830s

The Jackson Purchase is the western most section of Kentucky named for the 1818 purchase of the land between the Tennessee and Mississippi Rivers from the Chickasaw Indians by Andrew Jackson.

Davy Crockett hunted in the area.

The earliest settlers found wildlife to be abundant at first. Davy Crockett of neighboring northwest Tennessee became famous for hunting bear in the region. In his autobiography he says, "As soon as the time come for them (bears) to quit their houses and come out again in the spring, I took a notion to hunt a little more, and in about one month I killed forty-seven more, which made one hundred and five bears I had killed in less than one year from that time (1825). " Crockett lived at present day Rutherford Tennessee, only 30 miles from Fulton, Kentucky. His hunting skills won him fame and election to the US Congress in 1826 where he soon became a national folk hero.

Since Kentucky became a state in 1792, state government could simply expand into the Jackson Purchase eliminating the lawlessness that troubled some frontier regions due to lack of organized authority. The Kentucky General Assembly in 1820 approved division of the region into regularly surveyed townships and ranges avoiding disputes over land ownership that were common in older sections of the state. Plots of land were sold in quarter sections of 160 acres for $1 an acre and were registered at Wadesboro or Princeton.

At first the entire area was the western extension of Kentucky's Christian County. The entire Kentucky portion of the purchase was constituted as Hickman County in 1821 with its county seat at Wadesboro (a mostly town near Dexter in Calloway County) and consisted of the entire region.. Eventually this evolved into the eight counties that make up the Purchase today.

Earliest settlements were along the Mississippi River.

The earliest white settlement was by the military under Major George Rogers Clark, Kentucky Militia, who established Fort Jefferson on the Mississippi River at the mouth of Mayfield Creek in 1778 during the American Revolution. The post was abandoned in 1781 near the end of the revolution. One of the earliest continuously settled towns is Columbus, also on the Mississippi, was founded in 1804 at the place know as "The Iron Bluffs" (Les Rivages de Fer) by French explorers who thought the red colored bluffs might contain iron deposits.

Andrew Jackson was elected President in 1828, and the early Jacksonian period was one of optimism and prosperity. "The Common Man", it was said, had finally come into his own. Much of the American nation seemed to be pulling up its roots and heading west. The settlement of the Purchase was only a minor eddy in this great flood of human relocation.

In the age before trains, when roads were muddy tracks, the best way to travel west was by steamboat along the great rivers, the same ones that flow around the Jackson Purchase. One early road into the area crossed the Tennessee River and connected to the communities of Wadesboro, Mayfield, and Columbus, Kentucky. In effect, the road was the earliest version of what today is Kentucky Highway 80.　

Rising prices for cotton led many southern planters to migrate to Alabama, Mississippi, and Tennessee in the 1830s, pushing up prices of the best land to very high levels. The aristocratic cotton society avoided west Kentucky since its growing season is too short for cotton. Only Fulton County Kentucky, in the extreme southwest corner of the Purchase has ever produced much cotton.