We Should Soon Become Respectable: Nashville's Own Timothy Demonbreun (Truths, Lies, and Histories of Nashville)

About the Author\nElizabeth Elkins is a professional songwriter and author. She has written numerous songs recorded by country, pop, and rock artists. She holds degrees from Emory University and the University of Georgia, and is President of Historic Nashville, Inc. and a co-author of Hidden History of Music Row. When she's not on stage with her bands Granville Automatic or The Swear, she likes to hang out with horses.\nJacques-Timothe Boucher Sieur de Montbrun (anglicized to Demonbreun), born 1747 in Quebec, set the bar for country music's stories of cheating, gambling, drinking, and being the boss more than two centuries before anybody thought of supporting the storyline with a 1-4-5-4 chord progression and a fiddle.\nLightly called a "fur trader," he came to the city to make his fortune and fame, much like songwriters today. Looking back, it would be easy to call Demonbreun, the son of French Canadian near-royalty and brother to two nuns, a spoiled child who did what he wanted, a classic-case misogynist and polygamist, a conceited adventurer. He was a man who conned the Spanish governor out of a war, carried on graceful correspondence with Thomas Jefferson and Alexander Hamilton, owned several slaves, may have served as a spy, and was a decorated veteran. He fought in the Revolutionary War, extraordinarily so it seems, given the number of land grants he received across Kentucky and Tennessee.\nHe's also known around Nashville as the guy who lived in a cave.\nAuthor Elizabeth Elkins sorts through the legends and nails down the facts in order to present the true story of "Nashville's First Citizen."\nExcerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.\nTimothy was a master of the rivers, running the Mississippi, Ohio, and Illinois, eventually heading farther south to the unexplored Cumberland to trap game. Among the looping bends of that river, he found a salt lick frequented by game (this area became known as Sulphur Dell, today it’s the site of the Bicentennial Mall) and set up an outpost, taking full advantage of this Shawnee, Chickasaw, and Creek Nation hunting, fishing, and burial crossroads. It’s likely he had heard about the game in this region from his family, particularly from his uncles who had spent a great deal of time fur trapping in the region. The geography, especially the central bluff above the river, and the previous trading posts that had been set up by the Shawnee, made it a perfect focal point for trading with the natives. He planned to split his time between this new place and Kaskaskia, and to make the trip several times a year.\nAccording to the William Alexander Provine papers (which seem to be full of half-clues and shadows of everything that was really going on in Timothy’s life, thanks to plenty of unclear or half-finished letters and ideas), Timothy began to hunt and explore the area around the Cumberland River in the early 1770s. By 1774, Timothy had eight boats and seventeen men in his employ, and Katherine Demonbreun Whitefort recorded in her history that he built his first cabin for storage of furs and tallow on the banks of the Cumberland River at Nashville that same year.\nBut it is Josephus Conn Guild’s story of the day Timothy’s “discovered” what would become Nashville that set the legend in motion. In his 1878 book Old Times in Tennessee, Guild gave us a melodramatic retelling of events, setting a narrative that has blurred the lines between fact and fiction ever since.\n"They ran up what is now Lick Branch . . . and tied up their boat . . . DeMonbreun wore a blue cotton hunting shirt, leggings of deer-hide, a red waistcoat that had once been in the French army and a fox-skin cap, with the tail hanging down his back. He was a tall, athletic, dark-skinned man, with a large head, broad shoulders and chest, small legs, a high, short foot, an eagle eye, and an expression of daring about his mouth. His followers addressed him as Jacques. They concluded to trace the st