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Cumberland Gap is a 1,665 feet elevation pass through the Appalachian Mountains lying at the border of Kentucky, Tennessee and Virginia, long known to the Indians, but discovered for the Virginia Land Company by Dr. Thomas Walker in 1750 and named for the Duke of Cumberland. From the pass trails fan out to the south and west so that somewhat later a veteran of the French and Indian Wars, Daniel Boone, made this a highway to the promised land of the west. The so-called "Wilderness Road" was nearly 300 miles long, ending at the Ohio River at Louisville and within 15 years, at the end of the century, 100,000 people had traversed this trail to western Tennessee and Kentucky. Mostly unlettered, these people needed a good gun, a good horse and a good wife, along with good health, good luck, an axe and salt. Most had to carry their salt over the mountains, but at Boone County, Kentucky was a huge brine lake, which incidentally was also a great archaeological find, with a graveyard of mastodon bones. The salt licks were also used by the Indians and this immediately helped to initiate hard feelings early in the settlement of the area.
During the six years of the French-Indian War, the British got an education and became aware of the fact that they needed to overhaul their imperial system and strengthen their central authority. Previously all relation of England to the colonies was on the basis of a commercial empire, on the theory that the colonies existed solely for the benefit of the homeland and that in return the homeland owed them protection. Although the Acts of Trade and Navigation had been passed by Parliament in 1651 they had not been enforced until this century. These Acts called for exclusive navigation, in that all commerce had to involve only British or colonial ships and the "Entrepot Principle" which meant that foreign trade should normally be conducted through the mother country. After the war just discussed, England began to pass constricting laws, new taxes and new army conscriptions from the colonies themselves. This shocked the Americans. First came the Stamp Act, innocuous enough in itself, but inf uriating to the colonists and soon repealed at the insistence of William Pitt. But then came George 111 and Lord North, with still more repressive laws and taxes and a show-down became inevitable. (Ref. 39 ) (Go to 1140&1153)
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