Dr. Thomas Walker was a man of Virginia. He had attended William and Mary College, and was well educated for his times. As the agent of a land company which had a grant of new lands in Kentucky, he, with several companions, made a hard journey of six months into the wilderness. They started at Charlottesville in Virginia, went through the Blue Ridge into the Great Valley, and then followed the valley southwest. One of Walker’s companions bore the name of Ambrose Powell, and as they followed one of the long streams that flow to the southwest to form the Tennessee, they named it Powell’s river. His son afterwards was an officer in the Revolution, and it is said that A. P. Hill, a well-known Confederate general in the Civil War, was his great-grandson.

These were, in fact, no common men who, in the year 1750, ventured out into the forest, over the roughest trails we can imagine, among wild animals and savage men. Following down Powell’s river, the travelers saw rugged mountains on their right, the Cumberland range. As they wished to explore the forests of Kentucky, they were looking for a chance to pass the mountains, and by and by they came in sight of a deep notch, cut at least a thousand feet below the top of the mountain ridge (Fig. 54).

They turned aside to this and followed it out of the Great Valley. They had to climb up about five hundred feet through a wooded ravine in order to reach the top of the pass, and there was a similar slope on the other side. This brought them to an open valley and to a river, which they followed through a gap in another mountain range, the Pineville mountains.

Dr. Walker called the first pass the Cumberland Gap, in honor of a well-known Englishman, and the name has survived even to the present day. In like manner we have the Cumberland mountains. Walker did not go far enough west to find the beautiful Kentucky lands on the Ohio river. After wandering about in the high, rough country of eastern Kentucky, he finally reached his Virginia home without having accomplished much in the service of his company.

But he had found and named what has become one of the most famous historical places in America, the Cumberland Gap. He was not the first man to go through it, for the Indians had long been familiar with it. Their trail had traversed it for no one knows how many generations. Not only did it lead directly to the open, fertile country west of the mountains, but beyond it the warrior’s trail stretched northward through the woods to the Ohio river.

The Watauga Settlement was about fifty miles eastward from the Cumberland Gap. As the hardy pioneers did not make much of following a forest trail for fifty miles, the Watauga colony was next door to Kentucky, and the great gap in the Cumberland mountains was only a step farther on, either for them or for travelers to the West who might choose this route.

We must now follow the fortunes of the most famous of Kentucky hunters and pioneers, who, while he did not find or name the Cumberland Gap, often went through it, and is remembered by most people in connection with it. This man was Daniel Boone.

We could not find a better example of the movement along the Great Valley to the southwest than the life of Boone; for his childhood was spent on what was then the frontier, and his experience was like that of hundreds of others similarly reared.

Boone was born near the Schuylkill river in Pennsylvania in 1734, two years after the birth of Washington. This part of Pennsylvania was still on the edge of the wilderness, and from his early boyhood Boone knew all about the Indians. His family were Quakers, and he himself was quiet and thoughtful, learning to read from the Quaker wife of his eldest brother, but getting most of his education in the fields and woods. Though he could read, he spelled almost as badly as did Nicholas Herkimer. Boone had some experience as a blacksmith, which, his biographer says, taught him how to mend his traps and guns. He used to hunt in the woods in winter, helping thus to feed the family, and with the skins which he took to Philadelphia he bought powder, lead, and hunting knives.

When Boone was about sixteen years old his family decided to move. They went along the Great Valley, as many were doing in those days, crossed the Potomac, and traveled far through the valley of Virginia. Then they turned east, crossed the Blue Ridge, and made a home in the valley of the Yadkin river in North Carolina. They were thus east of the mountains, and across, to the west, was the Watauga Settlement.

While his home was in North Carolina Boone had an experience which helped him to be a rugged pioneer, for he went up to Virginia and across the mountains with General Braddock, serving as wagoner and blacksmith. He found himself in dangerous quarters in the battle, where many of the teamsters were shot, but he managed to cut his horses loose, mounted one of them, and escaped.

On this expedition he made friends with John Finley, and together they planned to go at some future time to Kentucky by the Cumberland Gap and enjoy the fine hunting in the forests of the West. Finley had already made a journey down to the falls of the Ohio river.

At home Boone lived, like all others in those valleys, in a small log cabin chinked with clay and warmed by a large fireplace, in which, says his biographer, “the young wife (for Boone was now married) cooked simple meals of corn mush, pumpkins, squashes, beans, potatoes, and pork, or wild meat of many kinds.”

Boone spent his time in farming, working at the forge, and hunting; but he liked hunting best, and was never so happy as in the thick forest alone with his gun. He often went on long hunting trips, returning with bear’s meat, venison, bear’s oil, and furs, the last to be sold for other things needed at home.

In 1767 Boone and one or two friends made a hunting tour into Kentucky, though they did not know they were so far west as that. As they were kept there by heavy snows, they camped at a “salt lick” and lived by shooting the buffaloes and other animals that came to get the salt.

The hunters returned to their homes in the spring and did not go out until 1769. Meantime John Finley was peddling in that south land, and one day surprised Boone, and himself, too, by knocking at the door of Boone’s cabin. He made the hardy pioneer a long visit, and in the spring, having talked it all over many times, they set out for Kentucky.

They crossed the Blue Ridge and the Great Valley and came to Cumberland Gap. This was Boone’s first journey to the great pass. It is pleasant now to stand in the gap at the top of the pass and think of the time when Boone with his hunting friends made their way up from the east and went happily down through the woods to the strange country on the west.

At one time they were taken by Indians, who plundered their camp and stole all their furs. Most of the party were discouraged and went back to the settlements, but Boone and one companion were angry at their loss and determined to stay and make it good. This was like Boone, who knew nothing of fear, and who did not easily give up what he wanted to do.

He made several trips to Kentucky and greatly liked the new country. At length, having decided to take his family with him and make his home there, he became the leader of the pioneers that went out under the Transylvania Company, as it was called.

They built a fort and founded a place named Boonesborough, after the great hunter. But he was much more than a hunter, being now a military commander and doing surveying also for people who were taking up tracts of new land. Houses and forts were built, forests were cleared, and crops were raised. Such was the beginning of the state of Kentucky.

It was not all simple and pleasant work, however. In 1768, the year before Daniel Boone and John Finley went through the Cumberland Gap, a great company of Indians had gathered at Fort Stanwix, which we remember from the battle of Oriskany, and by a treaty had given to the English the rights to the Kentucky region. But the powerful Cherokees of the southern mountains were not at Fort Stanwix, and they had something to say about the settlement of Kentucky lands. So Boone called them together at a great meeting on the Watauga river, and bought the Kentucky forests from them. This was the time when an old chief said to Boone, “Brother, we have given you a fine land, but I believe you will have much trouble settling it.” The old Indian was right,—they did have much trouble. Cabins were burnt, and settlers were slain with gun and tomahawk, but Boone and many others with him would admit no failure. People began to pour in through the Cumberland Gap, until more forests were cleared, the towns grew larger, and the Indians, who do not like to fight in the open country, drew back to the woods and the mountains.

Boone marked out the trail which was afterwards known as the Wilderness road. It had also been known as Boone’s trail, Kentucky road, Virginia road, and Caintuck Hog road. A man who went out with Boone in one of his expeditions to Kentucky kept a diary, and in it he gives the names of some of the new settlers. One of these was Abraham Hanks, who was Abraham Lincoln’s grandfather. It was no easy journey that these men made to Kentucky, and no easy life that they found when they got there, but they planted the first American state beyond the mountains, and the rough pioneers who lived in cabins and ate pork, pumpkins, and corn bread were the ancestors of some of our most famous men.

The Wilderness road has never been a good one, and is no more than any other byroad through a rough country to-day. Sometimes the early travelers, who always went in companies for safety, would be too tired to go on until they had stopped to rest and to get cheer by singing hymns and saying prayers. But they made the best of it, for they knew that they were going to a fine country, which would repay them for their sufferings.

Boone and five other men were once in camp by a stream, and were lucky enough to have with them the story of Gulliver’s Travels. One of the young men, who had been hearing the book read by the camp fire, came in one night bearing a couple of scalps that he had taken from a pair of savages. He told his friends that “he had been that day to Lulbegrud and had killed two Brobdingnags in their capital.” The stream near which it happened is still called Lulbegrud creek. These wilderness men made the best of things, and though they worked hard and fought often, they were a cheerful and happy company. They were not spoiled by having too many luxuries, and they did not think that the world owed them a living without any effort on their part.

Beginning about the time of the Declaration of Independence, many people found the way to Kentucky by the Great Valley, the Cumberland Gap, and the Wilderness road. When fifteen years had gone by there were seventy thousand people in Kentucky, along the Ohio river. Not all had come by the gap, for some had sailed down the river; but they all helped to plant the new state.

Moreover in fighting off the Indians from their own cabins and cornfields they had protected the frontiers of Virginia and others of the older states, so that Kentucky was a kind of advance guard beyond the mountains, and led the way for Ohio, Indiana, Tennessee, and other great states in the West and South.

Down in the heart of Kentucky, by the Ohio river, is a land long known as the Kentucky Blue Grass region. The “blue grass,” as it is called, grows luxuriantly here, as do grain and tobacco, for the soils, made by the wasting of limestone, are rich and fertile. Wherever the soil and climate are good, crops are large and the people thrive. They have enough to eat and plenty to sell, and thus they can have good homes, many comforts, books, and education.

If the pioneers had had to settle in the high, rough, eastern parts of Kentucky, it would not have been worth while to suffer so much to get there; but they were on the way to the Blue Grass country. Even before the coming of the white man there were open lands which, perhaps by Indian fires, had lost their cover of trees. Such lands are often called prairies. These prairies, however, were not so flat as those of Illinois, and they were bordered by groves and forests. There were fine streams everywhere, and near by was the great Ohio, ready to serve as a highway toward Philadelphia or New Orleans.

The Wilderness road came out on the river at the falls of the Ohio, and here, as we have learned, a city began to spring up, partly because of the falls and partly because of the Blue Grass region lying back of it. In this region we find the state capital, and here, along the roads, may be seen old mansions belonging to well-to-do descendants of the plucky men who came in by the Wilderness road or steered their flatboats down the Ohio.

If we go back to Cumberland Gap, we shall see that many things have happened since Boone’s time. In the pass and on the Pinnacle, a thousand feet above on the north, are ridges of earth, which show where busy shovels threw up defenses in the Civil War; for armies passed this way between Kentucky and the valley of Tennessee, and made the gap an important point to be seized and held.

The road through the gap is still about as bad a path as one could find. Near it on the east side of the mountains is yet to be seen a furnace of rough stones, built in those early days for smelting iron. But there is little else to remind us of that far-off time. To-day you may, if you choose, pass the mountains without climbing through the gap, for trains go roaring through a tunnel a mile long, while the echo of the screaming whistles rolls along the mountain sides.

On the flat grounds just inside the gap is Middlesboro, a town of several thousand people, with wide streets and well-built shops and houses. Only a few miles away are coal mines from which thousands of tons of coal are dug, and this is one reason why the railroads are here. There are endless stores of fuel under these highlands, and men are breaking into the wilderness as fast as they can.

But if we climb through the gap as Boone did, or ride a horse to the Pinnacle, we may look out upon the wonderful valley below, stretching off to the foot of the Great Smoky mountains, whose rugged tops carry our eyes far over into North Carolina. Or we may turn the other way and follow Boone’s trail to the Blue Grass. Down in the gap is a rough, weather-beaten pillar of limestone about three feet high and leaning as the picture shows (Fig. 59). It is almost, but not quite, where three states come together, for it is here, at the Cumberland Gap, that the corners of Virginia and Kentucky meet on the edge of Tennessee.