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, Barren and Warren counties. Another station was built near Greensburg. These stations or camps seem to have served only the immediate needs of the hunters while they were in the territory. [Illustration: Daniel Boone] Daniel Boone seems to have been the only one of these hunters to whom the wilderness especially appealed. Consequently, for many years he made frequent trips into the territory, staying as long as two years on one occasion, and winning the title of The Long Hunter. Boone was alone on many of these trips, never seeing the face of a white man, but frequently meeting roving bands of Indians. From a cave in the side of Pilot Knob in Powell County, he could catch glimpses of the joyous sports of the Shawnee boys at Indian Fields; and from the projecting rocks he feasted his eyes on the herds of buffalo winding across the prairie. No permanent Indian villages were found in Kentucky. It seems to have been a choice bit of hunting ground strongly contested by the tribes of the North and the tribes of the South. The Shawnees had a village at Indian Fields, in the eastern portion of Clark County, near the beautiful stream called Lulbegrud Creek.