Eastern
companies were taking up principalities, and at Cumberland Gap,
those helmeted Englishmen had acquired a kingdom. They were
building a town there, too, with huge steel plants, broad avenues
and business blocks that would have graced Broadway; and they
were pouring out a million for every thousand that it would have
cost Hale to acquire the land on which the work was going on.
Moreover they were doing it there, as Hale heard, because they
were too late to get control of his gap through the Cumberland.
At his gap, too, the same movement was starting. In stage and
wagon, on mule and horse, "riding and tying" sometimes, and even
afoot came the rush of madmen. Horses and mules were drowned in
the mud holes along the road, such was the traffic and such were
the floods. The incomers slept eight in a room, burned oil at one
dollar a gallon, and ate potatoes at ten cents apiece. The Grand
Central Hotel was a humming Real-Estate Exchange, and, night and
day, the occupants of any room could hear, through the thin
partitions, lots booming to right, left, behind and in front of
them. The labour and capital question was instantly solved, for
everybody became a capitalist—carpenter, brick-layer, blacksmith,
singing teacher and preacher.
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