A view of Dr. Thomas Walker

Dr. Thomas Walker, not Daniel Boone, is credited with being the first white colonist to “discover” the Cumberland Gap. Walker explored over into Kentucky in 1750, nearly two decades before Boone. He named both the Gap and the River for the Duke of Cumberland, the butcher of Culloden.

Here is a portrait of Walker from Ted Franklin Belue’s The Hunters of Kentucky. A Narrative History of America’s First Far West, 1750-1792 (Stackpole Books, 2003):

Of all the [Loyal Land Company's] members—all of them bookish, rich, ambitious, and influential men who measured wealth and status in delicately manicured estates, in vast acreage, in two- and three-story stone and clapboard homes fitted with imported English panes, in cattle and horses, in corn and burley fields and barns, in African chattel bought and sold at slave auctions—Walker was the one man among them best suited for the heady task at hand. [This being to claim 800,000 acres of wilderness granted them by George II. They would then parcel out this land to settlers who would owe them quitrents.]

And, too, besides the adventure, there was the ultimate quid pro quo: land. A gentry tobacco farmer, growing “that stinking weed” that so exhausted the soil after a harvest or two, and a two-time member of the House of Burgesses who also served on the Privy Council, Dr. Walker found such prospects irresistible. So alluring, in fact, that it was said of him, “Had Virginia’s land companies been a spider web, Dr. Walker would have been the spider.”

His father had died when he was a boy. But tragedy and loss notwithstanding, Thomas Walker was intellectually keen and well tutored, energetic and disciplined. Even in his last years, his disposition, sad son Francis, inclined toward “fire and great spirit,” and he remained an optimistic, merry woodsman of robust health almost until his death in 1794, a month shy of his eightieth birthday.

Neighbors swapped tales of his practical jokes, pranks bordering on the macabre and played out at the expense of Virginia’s upper crust. Walker, all knew, loathed bourgeois pretentiousness.

Once, it was rumored, he had invited all the neighbors for a barbecue, laying before them plates heaped high with what his guests deemed succulent mutton, which was soon devoured and heartily complimented. Candles dimming, mugs full, and pipe smoke curling to the rafters, someone noticed that Old Fowler, Walker’s aging hound, had yet to show. Alas!—it was soon discovered that Old Fowler’s ribs were laid bare before them. [pp. 20-21]

Barrel of laughs, that Tom Walker.

Although Walker explored over into Kentucky, the Loyal Land Company’s activities were truncated by the French and Indian War. He had worked in partnership with Colonel James Patton, a notorious land speculator. Well, notorious if you were a Native American. It was Patton who was the target of the Shawnee raid at Draper’s Meadow in which Mary Ingles was taken captive.

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