CUMBERLAND GAP • DICCIONARIO INGLES.COM • Definition of Cumberland Gap

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/kˈəmbərlənd gæp/ Listen

Cumberland Gap

noun

A pass through the Cumberland Mountains between Virginia and Kentucky that early settlers used in order to move west.

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Etymology of 'Cumberland Gap'

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"Cumberland gap" Quotes from Famous Books

... the wonderfully fertile realm that he had discovered stirred the hearts of the Boone brothers. In 1769 Daniel Boone, his brother-in-law John Stuart, Joseph Holden, James Mooney and William Cooley, guided by the old but stout-limbed Findlay (a peddler by trade and a hunter by nature) crossed the Cumberland Gap Mountain of eastern Kentucky, and with horses and packs traveled still westward into that country where white foot ...

— Boys' Book of Frontier Fighters • Edwin L. Sabin

... this Boone took no conspicuous part in the settlement of Kentucky. The expedition with which he left the Yadkin in 1773 met with a terrible disaster near Cumberland Gap, in which his eldest son and five more young men were killed by Indians, and the whole party, discouraged by the blow, retired to the safer region of Clinch River. In the mean time the dauntless speculator Richard Henderson had begun his occupation with all the pomp of viceroyalty. Harrodsburg ...

— Abraham Lincoln: A History V1 • John G. Nicolay and John Hay

... Governor St. Clair, hardy pioneers were laying the foundations of a new society in the Southwest, without the protecting arm of the Government. Before the war Daniel Boone had made his famous trace to "the country of Kentucke" through the Cumberland Gap; and Robertson had led his colony from North Carolina to the upper waters of the Tennessee. Settlers had followed the long-rangers; and numerous communities sprang up by salt lick and water course. In all these settlements there was much local independence. For ...

— Union and Democracy • Allen Johnson

... climate and fertile soil suited to agriculture, enclosed by strong natural boundaries, made for compact settlement, in contrast to the wide diffusion of the French. Later, when a growing population pressed against the western barrier, mountain gates opened at Cumberland Gap and the Mohawk Valley; the Ohio River and the Great Lakes became interior thoroughfares, and the northwestern prairies lines of least resistance to the western settler. Rivers played the same part in directing and expediting this forward ...

— Influences of Geographic Environment - On the Basis of Ratzel's System of Anthropo-Geography • Ellen Churchill Semple

... England. Following along this chain in a south-westerly direction, in search of some pass or defile by which they could cross the cliffs, they came to the remarkable depression in the mountains to which they gave the name of Cumberland Gap. On the western side of the range they found a beautiful mountain stream, rushing far away, with ever increasing volume, into the unknown wilderness, which the Indians called Shawnee, but which Doctor Walker's party baptised with the name of Cumberland River. These names have ...

— Daniel Boone - The Pioneer of Kentucky • John S. C. Abbott