Duffield, VA
At the intersection of State #871 and US 23 you pick up the major short cut of the Boone Wilderness Trail, the “Devil’s Race Path”. It left the main trail on the other side of the ridge at the point where you left US 23 to go to Natural Tunnel. As the wagons labored up the steep grade of Purchase Ridge they were easy prey for thieves that lived there. The emigrants would race their wagons to avoid being waylaid, and thence the name.
The intersection here is the most commonly named site in the journals kept by the pioneers as they traveled west along the Trail. It was known as “Little Flat Lick”, and was named after a salt lick spring that oozed from the ground under the road fill to your left that supports US 23 as it comes off of Purchase Ridge into Duffield. Named in contradistinction to Big Flat Lick that lies on the Trail in Kentucky, and not to the one further down this Valley of the North Fork of the Clinch, it was heavily used by game. The pioneers found it a convenient place to replace their meat supplies.
Look up at Powell Mountain ahead of you, and a little to your right. The notch in the mountain that you see over the upper end of the industrial park is Kane Gap. The Trail traversed the center of the industrial park and made its way through this last major gap on the Trail before it reached Cumberland Gap. It is the only significant segment of the Trail in Virginia that has not been paved over. The original roadbed through the gap and down the back side of the Mountain is still in its near original condition. When the State of Virginia improved this road as the Fincastle to Cumberland Gap Turnpike, it shifted the route from Kane Gap further west to the site of the present passage of US 58 & US 421.
Kane Gap was the site of the confrontation in 1793 between Chief Bob Benge and Ensign Moses Cockrell. Cockrell was a famous scout for the Holston Militia, and was a rival of Benge’s. He and two others were bringing a mule train up the trail from Little Flat Lick, and Benge and a war party ambushed them. The two other mule skinners were killed, but Cockrell outran Benge the three miles down the northern face of Powell Mountain to gain the safety of Scott’s Station.