Searching for William Bartram's Buffalo Lick

The writings of Philadelphia natural scientist William Bertram are among the best sources on the ecological and geographical conditions that prevailed in the Southeast in the years immediately preceding the Revolutionary War. In this essay, particular attention is paid to his colorful and detailed description of an important but somewhat unusual landmark on Georgia's Indian frontier. It was a buffalo lick, a place at which buffaloes and other large herbivores were known to lick and eat clays in the soil. The lick under investigation, termed the "Great Buffalo Lick," was such a singular place that it was designated to be a boundary-line checkpoint in an important treaty negotiated to allow the Colony of Georgia to acquire a huge cession of land from the Cherokee and Creek Indians in 1773. Although the Great Buffalo Lick remained a well-known place in the decades immediately following that date, with the passage of time its location was lost from memory. In the 1930s, researchers began to employ cartographic evidence to augment Bartram's colorful but imprecise description. At least three different specific sites were described by researchers who argued that they had found the place Bartram had visited and described. These sites did not agree with my own analysis, first published in the 1960s. Presented here is further analysis, based on late 18th-century land survey plats and deeds, that has allowed me finally to precisely locate Bartram's Great Buffalo Lick on the present-day landscape.