State provided ample
grazing for the herds of buffalo and deer that were found there at the
time of the coming of man. The skeletons that have been exhumed indicate
that it was the feeding ground of the giant mastodon before the discovery
of America.

About two hundred years after Columbus discovered America, a young man
twenty-two years of age came to Canada from the Old World. On his arrival
he learned from the settlers and Indians the possibility of a passage to
the South Sea, which they then thought the Gulf of Mexico to be. Desirous
of making this journey, and lured by the possibility of reaching the
Pacific by water, he secured the assistance of Indians and some white
hunters as guides and set out upon an expedition of exploration into the
country concerning which he had heard such fascinating stories.

Crossing the St. Lawrence and traveling southward, he came to what is now
called Allegheny River. Securing birchbark canoes, he and his party
descended the Allegheny to its junction with the Monongahela, then turning
southwestward on the beautiful stream formed by these two small rivers and
now known as the Ohio, he explored the country along the banks of the
river to what was called by him the Rapids of the Ohio. Thus, LaSalle was
the first to gaze upon the country from the mouth of the Big Sandy to the
present site of Louisville, and to make a record of such discoveries.

The Virginians and Daniel Boone

Near the middle of the eighteenth century, or about 1750, a party of
Virginia hunters, growing weary of the monotony of home life and desiring
to find better hunting grounds, penetrated the Appalachian Mountains by
way of Powell's Valley and through Cumberland Gap, into the eastern
portion of what is now Kentucky, and hence were the first white men to
approach the land from the eastern side. In 1767, John Finley and Daniel
Boone, hearing of the fine hunting in this section, came to Kentucky from
North Carolina and built a cabin on Red River, near where Estill, Powell,
and Clark counties are now joined. Two years later, about forty hunters
and adventurers came to the territory and made their camp at what they
then called Price's Meadows, about six miles from the present site of
Monticello in Wayne County. This camp, by virtue of its location near the
Cumberland River, developed into a distributing point for the country
lying along the Cumberland, now included in Wayne, Green, Barr