Although settlers began pouring through the Cumberland Gap into the bluegrass section of Kentucky in the mid 1700's, the southeast center of the state was virtually unsettled until the late 1790's. Only a few explorers and hunters set foot on the Indian and animal trails along our creeks.

During this time, the Indians, mostly the Creek and the Cherokee, frequently attacked the travelers through the Gap and the few pioneers who had settled along the Cumberland Trail. The State of Virginia raised a number of militia companies and assigned some of them to protect the settlers and the pioneers. In 1794, one of these companies, raised in Russell County, Virginia, under the command of Lieutenant Andrew Colvin, was stationed at a blockhouse on the Cumberland Gap to guard the frontier. While they were stationed there, three men were killed on Cannon Creek, in present day Bell County. Under the command of Colvin, the company pursued the indians to Hickory Gap on the Emory River in Tennessee, but did not overtake them.

The roster of this company contains many names that later settled in this area: Salyers, Bowling, Flannery, Short, Cox, Fraser, Daniel, Alsop, Dorton and several Howards, among them Samuel Howard. Earlier, Samuel had served elsewhere on the Virginia frontier, but he must have liked what he saw when he was stationed at the Gap as within the next two years he moved his family here. One of this younger sons, Wilkerson `Wix' Howard, was born here about 1796 and is said by many to have been the first white child born in what, in 1819, was to become Harlan County.