Abstract Shaped by Native American paths and old buffalo traces, the Wilderness Road was forged in 1775 by Daniel Boone for the Transylvania Company. The trail, and later the road, winded through the Cumberland Gap–a notch in the Appalachian Mountains located near the intersection of Kentucky, Virginia and Tennessee–through the interior of Kentucky and to the Ohio River. The Wilderness Road served as an avenue of westward migration for some 300,000 settlers and led to the establishment of the first...