Short answers, pulled from the story.
The Cumberland River is 688 miles long. It flows generally west from headwaters in the Appalachian Mountains of Kentucky through Tennessee, passing through Nashville and Clarksville, before entering Kentucky again and merging with the Ohio River at Smithland, northeast of Paducah.
The Cumberland River begins as three separate forks that converge in Baxter, Kentucky, in Harlan County. Martin's Fork, Clover Fork, and Poor Fork each rise in the Kentucky mountains near the Virginia border before joining at Baxter to form the main river.
Virginia explorer Thomas Walker named the Cumberland River in 1758. Whether he named it for the Duke of Cumberland or the English county of Cumberland is not known.
The Shawnee called the Cumberland River Wasioto. French traders referred to it as the Riviere des Chaouanons, meaning River of the Shawnee, and English-speaking settlers also used the name Shawnee River or Shawanoe River for years after Thomas Walker's 1758 journey.
Cumberland Falls is a 68-foot waterfall on the Cumberland River in Kentucky, recognized as one of the largest waterfalls in the southeastern United States. It is one of the very few places in the Western Hemisphere where a moonbow, a rainbow produced by moonlight, can be observed.
Severe flooding in April 1977 destroyed most homes and businesses in Harlan's floodplain, leading to the construction of Martins Fork Dam and a rerouting of Clover Fork. A flood control project begun in 1992 redirected the fork through a tunnel under Little Black Mountain so it no longer flows through downtown Harlan.