For over 10,000 years, Native Americans used The Breaks for seasonal foraging and hunting, with more permanent settlements near the Ohio River to the north and the New and Tennessee Rivers to the east and south. When Americans of European and African descent began settling the region, established Indian paths passed south up Russell Fork by way of Skegg Gap on Pine Mountain and by way of Grassy Creek and Hunts Creek, roughly along present Route 80, and no single tribe claimed the area, though the Shawnee were dominant to the north and the Cherokee to the south. In 1750, Dr. Thomas Walker crossed and named Louisa, now Levisa, Fork to the north; soon afterward Christopher Gist crossed Pine Mountain at Pound Gap to the west; but the first visitation was by Daniel Boone and party in 1767 during a long hunt, wintering near present Prestonsburg, Kentucky. Longhunters continued to visit, and in 1810 the first permanent settler in the Russell Fork Basin was "Fighting" Dick Colley at Sand Lick. Other settlers followed, living much like Native Americans through hunting, gathering, and subsistence farming centered primarily on corn, which served as coin and barter as well as food and was also made into corn whiskey, or moonshine. A log cabin originally built in 1838 by the Counts family at nearby Lick Creek typified such frontier homes: local poplar logs were sawn, dragged by workhorses to the site, and hand-hewn, and the house would have had an upstairs sleeping loft and room for a family of eight or more. As the American Revolution ended in the late 1700s, small homesteads like this spread along the frontier while the Cherokee and Shawnee retreated to their homelands, leaving historic hunting lands to incoming families and settlers from the east seeking new lives in the Appalachian Mountains.