For 44 months, thousands of Confederate and Federal troops guarded Cumberland Gap, a strategic pass and wagon road. More than a dozen fortifications and batteries on its rugged terrain made it a defense that no general was willing to assault. Confederate troops watching the Gap had to stop any Union strikes that might cripple nearby saltworks, mines, and railroads vital to their war effort, and Southerners also saw the Gap as a way to reclaim Kentucky and its resources for the Confederacy. Federal commanders saw the Gap as a route to move a large army into Tennessee and cut the Confederacy in two. In the earliest days of the war, trees that might interfere with clear fields of fire for cannon and rifles had been cut down, leaving wartime mountainsides bare.