week of 4/17/02
 
 
 

Cumberland Gap helped settle Appalachia
By George Ellison
Last Saturday at about noon — after a short hike up a mountainside — I found myself standing in a drizzling mist on a trail near where the states of Tennessee, Virginia and Kentucky corner. Pushing on a little ways up the trail through a forest of tulip poplar, dogwood, and redbud in full bloom, I came to a gap that has helped define Appalachian and American history.

For the first time in my life — despite having read about this site for half a century — I was standing on the very spot where white settlers first gained access to the lands west of the southern Appalachians. This was the gateway to the trans-Allegheny west long before St. Louis became the gateway to the trans-Mississippi west. I was standing where great Indian warriors and frontiersmen like Thomas Walker and Daniel Boone had stood. No place name resonates more fully in our frontier history than the Cumberland Gap.

Wood bison created the original trail as they passed back and forth through the gap to reach the salt flats and rich pasturage on either side. A thousand or so years ago, the animal trail became the Warrior’s Path for the Indian tribes of eastern North America — Shawnee, Iroquois, Cherokee, Creek, Tuscarora, and others — who used it also as a trading path when not fighting. The Cherokee chief and warrior Dragging Canoe mentioned to the white settlers that the land beyond the gap in present Kentucky — the settlers called it “Kaintuck” — was “a dark and bloody ground.” Not being the sort of folks who were frightened easily by mere words, they had to learn the hard way that Dragging Canoe wasn’t exaggerating.

I am especially fond of those places where geology, geography and history are intertwined. The gap is a prime example. This notch in the steep eastern front of the Cumberland Plateau was created millions of years, long before the first Native Americans laid eyes on it more than 10,000 years ago. Slowly but surely geologists have figured out what happened here that set the stage for subsequent human events.

A stream now named Yellow Creek originally flowed off present Cumberland Mountain eastward into present Powell River (now mostly impounded by the TVA) in eastern Tennessee north of present Knoxville. When the Appalachian uplift took place more than 250 million years ago (as a result of the continental collisions that created the super continent of Pangaea), Cumberland Mountain was slowly tilted back to the west. Yellow Creek cut a notch in the terrain in an attempt to continue flowing eastward. The mountain, however, was rising and tilting faster than the steam could cut downward. Eventually, Yellow Creek was diverted northwestward into the present Cumberland River. But the notch — originally a water gap — remained as a wind gap, waiting patiently for human use and a name.

In the spring of 1750, a venture capitalist from Albemarle County, Va., named Dr. Thomas Walker penetrated the wilderness and discovered The Gap for the Loyal Land Company, in which he was a prime investor. The LLC had an 800,000-acre grant “beyond the mountains,” but the investors first needed to find a way to get there before they could sell land to potential settlers. Knowing which side his bread was buttered on, Walker quite prudently named The Gap in honor of the Duke of Cumberland, the son of King George II.

The French and Indian War (1754-63) — during which most of the Indians (including the Cherokees) sided with the French — as well as the fact that the Cherokees refused to cede access to the land until 1775 (when the Treaty of Sycamore Shoals was signed) prevented immediate settlement. This did not, of course, keep various hunters, trappers, and explorers from risking their lives in the land beyond the Gap before that treaty was signed. The most famous of these explorers became an icon in American frontier history and lore.

“There’s a big gap in the mountain range which the Indians use,” an itinerant peddler named John Finley happened to mention in 1768 to a 34-year-old frontiersman then living on the headwaters of the Yadkin River near Beaver Creek in the Brushy Mountains of North Carolina. That’s all the stimulation Daniel Boone required.

The next year he, Finley, and four companions set off for the “big gap” and passed through it into “Kaintuck.” Boone was enthralled: “Just at the close of day the gentle gales retired and left the place to the disposal of a profound calm. Not a breeze shook the most tremulous leaf. I had gained the summit of a commanding ridge, and, looking around with astonishing delight, beheld the ample plains, the beauteous tracts below.”

After remaining for two years alone and happy in this Eden, hunting and wandering, Boone returned to his wife, Becky, and children in North Carolina. But he couldn’t get the “astonishing” vision of “Kaintuck” out of his mind. Several years later he returned with a party of settlers. When his oldest son was killed in a vicious Indian raid before they even reached the Gap, the grief-stricken father buried the boy alongside the trail and returned home.

After the Cherokee treaty was signed in 1775, Boone was commissioned by the Transylvania Land Company to blaze a trail to the Gap. Not one to fool around, he hired 30 backwoodsmen and supervised the roughhewn crew as they hacked a trace from the Long Island at Kingsport, Tenn., to the Gap in less than three weeks!

Thus was born the Wilderness Road, over which by the end of the Revolutionary War some 12,000 persons had crossed into the new territory. By 1792 the population was more than 100,000, and Kentucky was admitted to the Union. It is estimated that by 1810, before canals and steamboats made other routes to the West more viable, almost 300,000 settlers had used the Wilderness Road through the Gap as their access to the new Eden.

I stood in the Gap last Saturday, thinking about Dragging Canoe and Daniel Boone and those early settlers. How astonished would they be to learn that a highway (U.S. 25E) for motorized vehicles had been routed through the Gap in the early part of the 20th century? Or that a four-lane tunnel under the Gap for this same traffic had been completed in 1996? Or that now the old highway had been cleared out so that portions of the original trail and wagon road could be restored? Or that there was a Cumberland Gap National Historic Park with exhibits commemorating their exploits? I guess they’d just scratch their heads and chuckle.

But from where I stood you couldn’t see the restored highway bed above the old trail or the tunnel or the national park’s visitor center. All I could see through the swirling mist were the rock walls towering above The Gap and a small patch of blue sky way out over the far valley in Kentucky.

(Note: For more information about visiting the Cumberland Gap National Historic Park go to www.gorp.com/gorp /resource/ us_nhp/ky_cumbe.htm)

George Ellison is a writer who lives in Bryson City. He wrote the biographical introductions for the reissues of two Appalachian classics: Horace Kephart’s Our Southern Highlanders and James Mooney’s History, Myths, and Sacred Formulas of the Cherokees. Readers can contact him at P.O. Box 1262, Bryson City, N.C. 28713, or at ellisongeorge@cs.com