who led the crew that cut through the cumberland gap
Cumberland Gap In 1775 Daniel Boone, hired by the Transylvania Company, arrived in the region leading a company of men to widen the path through the gap to make settlement of Kentucky and Tennessee easier. On his arrival Boone discovered that Martin had beaten him to Powell Valley, where Martin and his men were clearing land for their own settlement â€“ the westernmost settlement in English colonial America at the time.[12] By the 1790s the trail that Boone and his men built had been widened to accommodate wagon traffic and sometimes became known as the Wilderness Road.