As European colonists explored westward from Virginia, they regarded this region as a wilderness, yet they traveled by trails first made by native people and by traces worn by bison and other large animals. When Dr. Thomas Walker’s party entered what is now Kentucky through a gap in the Cumberland Mountains, they followed an existing trail known as the War Road or Warriors’ Path, and later explorers and colonists also used this route through the Cumberland Gap. In 1775, Daniel Boone blazed a trail into Kentucky by using parts of the Warrior’s Path and other trails, and Boone’s Trace passed about three miles east of here. In the years that followed, thousands of settlers traveled Boone’s Trace, tripling Kentucky’s population by the time it became the 15th state in 1792. In 1795, the Kentucky legislature ordered a wagon road from Crab Orchard to Virginia through the Cumberland Gap; it followed parts of Boone’s Trace but took a different route through this area, then called the Rockcastle Hills, and became known as the Wilderness Road. During the early 1800s, the Wilderness Road was the most direct route for commerce into and out of Kentucky. Although other western routes opened later in the century, the road remained important in the Civil War, offering Confederates access toward the Bluegrass region and north of the Ohio River, and giving the Union a route to the South and to the Confederate supply line. In the late summer of 1861, Union forces established Camp Wildcat at the junction of the Wilderness Road and the road to Richmond and Lexington. When Confederate troops attacked the hilltop camp on October 21, 1861, they could not drive the Union soldiers from the Rockcastle Hills, and Confederate General Zollicoffer later called Camp Wildcat “a natural fortification, almost inaccessible.” The Wilderness Road and Camp Wildcat remained active throughout the war, with both Confederate and Union forces using the camp as control of this section of road shifted between the two armies.