Cumberland Gap, “that high-swung gateway through the mountain” stands as “a landmark of what Nature can do when she wishes to give an opportunity to the human race in its migrations and discoveries, without surrendering control of its liberty and its fate.” Here passed the mound-building Indian and the buffalo, marking the first routes from North to South across the continent. Here later passed the first flood-tide of white men’s immigration. There are few spots on the continent, it is said, where the traveler of today is brought more quickly to a pause, overcome equally by the stupendous panorama before him, and by the memory of the historical associations which will assail even the most indifferent. Ere you reach the Gap “the idea of it,” writes Mr. Allen, “dominates the mind. While yet some miles away, it looms up, 1675 feet in elevation, some half a mile across from crest to crest, the pinnacle on the left towering to the height of 2500 feet. It was late in the afternoon when our tired horses began the long, winding, rocky climb from the valley to the brow of the pass. As we stood in the passway, amid the deepening shadows of the twilight and the solemn repose of the mighty landscape, the Gap seemed to be crowded with two invisible and countless pageants of human life, the one passing in, the other passing out; and the air grew thick with unheard utterances—primeval sounds undistinguishable and strange, of creatures nameless and never seen by man; the wild rush and whoop of retreating and pursuing tribes; the slow steps of watchful pioneers; the wail of dying children and the songs of homeless women; the muffled tread of routed and broken armies—all the sounds of surprise and delight, victory and defeat, hunger and pain, and weariness and despair, that the human heart can utter. Here passed the first of the white race who led the way into the valley of the Cumberland; here passed that small band of fearless men who gave the Gap its name; here passed the ‘Long Hunters’; here rushed armies of the Civil War; here has passed the wave of westerly immigration, whose force has spent itself only on the Pacific slopes; and here in the long future must flow backward and forward the wealth of the North and the South.”
FOOTNOTES:
[1] Johnson’s First Explorations of Kentucky (Filson Club Publications, No. 13), contains the journals of Walker and Gist used in connection with this chapter.
[2] Johnson’s First Explorations of Kentucky (Filson Club Publications No. 13), p. 59.
[3] First Explorations of Kentucky (Filson Club Publications No. 13), pp. 85-86.
[4] MSS. of Major Pleasant Henderson in the Draper Collection, Madison, Wisconsin; Kentucky MSS., vol. 2, fol. 23.
[5] Draper Collection: Kentucky MSS. vol. 1.
[6] The maternal grandfather of Abraham Lincoln.
[7] This copy of the journal was made from the original by Mary Catharine Calk, granddaughter of Thomas Calk, Jr.