Prior to settlers moving west of the Appalachian Mountains, migrating herds of animals stomped out paths across the land when they migrated and wandered in search of food.
Longhunters were the first European people to come in to what is now Tennessee.
Who were the Longhunters? Longhunters were men who traveled in groups of two or three looking for wild animals. They used Indian trails to travel over the Appalachian Mountains into Tennessee.
Why were these men called Longhunters? They got this name because they stayed in Tennessee for a long time, sometimes months at a time, hunting animals for skins and meat to dry and sell back in the original 13 colonies.
How did the Longhunters impact the settlement of Tennessee? When the Longhunters returned to their homes in the east, they told people about all the land west of the Appalachian mountains and people began to want to move to Tennessee.
Daniel Boone was a longhunter from Virginia. He had heard about an abundance of wild animals and land with good soil in a place called "Kentucky," which was located just over the Appalachian Mountains.
He began exploring and cutting trails from Virginia to Kentucky. In 1775, Daniel Boone lead a group of men who cut a trail through the Cumberland Gap.
The Cumberland Gap was a notch in the Appalachian Mountains located near the intersection of Kentucky, Virginia, and Tennessee. The trail became known as "Boone Trace."
Traveling through the Cumberland Gap made the journey to the Tennessee and Kentucky much easier because the settlers did not have to travel over the mountains.
Daniel Boone was important to the settlement of new territories like Kentucky and Tennessee for two reasons:
Longhunters, like Daniel Boone returned to their homes in the original 13 states. They told people about all the new lands they had discovered west of the Appalachian mountains and people began to want to move there.
Daniel Boone's discovery of the Cumberland Gap and his development of the Boone Trace, both helped make the journey to these new lands easier on the new frontier settlers.
As more and more settlers began to travel on these trails, the government decided to improve them.
Specifically, the government mandated that the trails be formed into roads. The major roads traveling west needed to be 30 feet wide and able to accommodate wagons carrying 1,000 pound loads.