Charquis

Charquis lies in the far western reaches of the Kentucky country, where the Ohio River and the Tennessee River meet the forested bottomlands. From around the tenth century, Mississippian farmers grew maize in increasing quantities alongside beans and squash, living in villages along the rivers and trading shell and stone across the valleys. In the seventeenth century, European goods reached parts of Kentucky through Indigenous trade networks, sometimes before any direct contact with Europeans. The Kentucky country later passed to Virginia's western lands and became a United States state in 1792, but its river villages had already been shaped by these earlier exchanges.