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| Geography of Southwest Virginia
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 Daniel Boone leading a party through the Cumberland Gap | At first only blazed trails through the great wilderness, then traces trodden out more plainly by the feet of pioneers and pack-horses, impassable to wagons, these transmontane roads offered no easy conditions for travel. The floor of the Great Valley in southern Virginia rises to 1700 feet and the linear ranges to be crossed were in general only 6OO or 800 feet higher; but each in turn barred the western horizon like a wall, and only here and there were their even sky-lines notched by a gap. These gaps were never opposite one another in the successive ranges, so the traveler had to take a circuitous way up and down the intervening valleys from pass to pass. Source:Semple, 1903:67.
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