Poor Adam Cahill. More than 100 years ago, J.W. Croan wrote that Cahill was so ugly the Indians wouldn't take his scalp, and that's the nicest thing I can find that anyone said about him.

Truthfully, there is very little said about him anywhere. In 1936, Hewitt Taylor wrote an article about Shepherdsville for The Louisville Herald, and it mentioned that Cahill was one of a group of men who arrived in the Bullitt's Lick area in 1775, so it is likely that he worked in the early saltworks there.

Beyond that, we have Croan's description and mentions in Lewis Collins' "History of Kentucky." Plus we have a pretty little knob that bears his name standing watch over the former saltworks site.

Writing for the Bullitt Pioneer newspaper in 1897, Croan described Cahill as a wood hauler for the fires that kept the kettles of saltwater boiling. It hadn't taken long for the trees close by the salt wells to be chopped down for fuel, and in the early days men with axes would venture to the closest forest for more. In this case, it was the hillside of the nearby knob. Apparently Cahill was part of the "grunt labor" paid to haul the wood down the hillside.

According to Croan, a band of Indians managed to creep around the hillside and capture Cahill, likely on his last trip up the hill, after the wood cutters had quit for the day. It seems that, again according to Croan, the Indians used withes, which are flexible twigs like willows, to lash Cahill to a tree where they proceeded to torment him, and as Croan put it, he was "whipped nearly to death."

Still following Croan's tale, we learn that the Indians left Cahill for dead, but that friends from the saltworks found him alive and rescued him. Croan explains that this is how the knob got its name.

Well, that's one version of what happened to Cahill, but in his first edition of the "History of Kentucky," published in 1848, Collins said Indians "whipped to death an old man" on that knob.

Then 30 years later Collins' son Richard republished his father's work with additions, and included the contents of a letter in which an unnamed correspondent gave his version of how the knob got its name.

He described how "the fires of an hundred salt furnaces gleamed through the forest, and the Wyandot sitting on Cahill's knob and looking down on five hundred men on the plain below," and told of sitting in the tree where "Cahill was bound by the Indians, while they procured his funeral pyre out of the dead limbs of the pitch-pine that grows on the mountain's side."

According to his description, the Indians were interrupted by the cracking of brush that they supposed were the sounds of their enemies coming in search of Cahill. They darted into the thicket on the back side of the hill to hide, not realizing that it was only oxen out to graze.

Cahill slipped his bonds, escaped in the darkness, and made his way back to the licks, where he sounded an alarm. The armed saltworkers chased the Indians as far as the Ohio River before they got away.

So there you have it: Cahill was either whipped nearly to death, but was too ugly to be scalped; or he was set to be burned alive, but was rescued by munching oxen. Or perhaps there is more to the story than we will ever know.

At any rate, the next time you pass by the Bullitt Lick Baptist Church cemetery, look up behind it at the lonely knob and remember poor Adam Cahill.

© Charles Hartley, Shepherdsville, Ky.

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