At length Murrell and his band were driven out, and sought a new field of operations on the Lower Mississippi.  They left germs behind them, however, that developed into horse thieve counterfeiters, and later into guerrillas and bushwhackers.

When the Rebellion broke out the region at once became the theater of military operations.  Twice Cumberland Gap was seized by the Rebels, and twice was it wrested away from them.  In 1861 it was the point whence Zollicoffer launched out with his legions to “liberate Kentucky,” and it was whither they fled, beaten and shattered, after the disasters of Wild Cat and Mill Springs.  In 1862 Kirby Smith led his army through the Gap on his way to overrun Kentucky and invade the North.  Three months later his beaten forces sought refuge from their pursuers behind its impregnable fortifications.  Another year saw Burnside burst through the Gap with a conquering force and redeem loyal East Tennessee from its Rebel oppressors.

Had the South ever been able to separate from the North the boundary would have been established along this line.

Between the main ridge upon which Cumberland Gap is situated, and the next range on the southeast which runs parallel with it, is a narrow, long, very fruitful valley, walled in on either side for a hundred miles by tall mountains as a City street is by high buildings.  It is called Powell’s Valley.  In it dwell a simple, primitive people, shut out from the world almost as much as if they lived in New Zealand, and with the speech, manners and ideas that their fathers brought into the Valley when they settled it a century ago.  There has been but little change since then.  The young men who have annually driven cattle to the distant markets in Kentucky, Tennessee and Virginia, have brought back occasional stray bits of finery for the “women folks,” and the latest improved fire-arms for themselves, but this is about all the innovations the progress of the world has been allowed to make.  Wheeled vehicles are almost unknown; men and women travel on horseback as they did a century ago, the clothing is the product of the farm and the busy looms of the women, and life is as rural and Arcadian as any ever described in a pastoral.  The people are rich in cattle, hogs, horses, sheep and the products of the field.  The fat soil brings forth the substantials of life in opulent plenty.  Having this there seems to be little care for more.  Ambition nor avarice, nor yet craving after luxury, disturb their contented souls or drag them away from the non-progressive round of simple life bequeathed them by their fathers.

CHAPTER II.

Scarcity of food for the army—­raid for forage—­encounter wit the rebels —­sharp cavalry fight—­defeat of the “Johnnies”—­Powell’s valley opened up.