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. [Illustration: FIG. 55. DANIEL BOONE] 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.