The other day on Facebook, one of my friends linked to this entry on Demonbreun's Cave at Atlas Obscura. The entry is notable for being almost completely wrong. But the parts I wanted to focus on, because I think they're helpful in understanding Nashville's history are the parts that say he "took up the life of a simple fur trader in Tennessee" and that he was "the first resident of European descent in what is now Nashville."
There's not really such a thing as a "simple fur trader," and because there's not really such a thing as a simple fur trader, we can't call Timothy Demonbreun the first person of European descent in the area.
So, let's talk about the fur trade. Before the "Virginians" — local Native Americans called anyone not from here who wasn't Spanish or French or British from Great Britain "Virginians" whether they were actually from Virginia or not — got here, fur trading was the big business of the region. When I say "big," I mean that it was international. Furs harvested in what would become Nashville ended up on the heads and backs of people all over Europe. But it also might be helpful to think of the fur trade like the drug trade. Anyone could do it, but to do it and to do it successfully, you had to be hooked into the right networks. You had to know a guy who knew a guy who could move your product.
Similar to the drug trade, there were always ongoing skirmishes over territory and occasionally, there were huge battles. The main groups that we know about who participated in the fur trade here in the 1700s were the Cherokee, who lived at that time in a bunch of villages kind of loosely located near Chattanooga and northward and a little southwestward, the Creek, who were settled along the Tennessee River directly south of us, the Chickasaw, whose nation started roughly at the Tennessee to the west of us, and, well, here's where it gets interesting.
The truth is that the Creek and the Cherokee fought regular and bitter wars throughout the 1700s. They hated each other. The times they worked together, sometimes with the Chickasaw, were to drive the Shawnee out of the Nashville area. We know that Timothy Demonbreun's predecessor, De Charleville, was living with the Shawnee in what is now Nashville. We also know that the Creek, Cherokee, and Chickasaw, in various configurations over the 1700s, had to fight the Shawnee multiple times to get them removed completely from Nashville. Even then, Shawnee warriors fought at the Battle of Buchanan's Station. If they didn't live here, they sure loved to frequently vacation here.
Also, the Yuchi Indians have a tradition that they had settlements along the Cumberland River basically from East Nashville to Gallatin, which they abandoned after they got tired of being caught in the crossfire of the great battles between the Shawnee and everybody else. So, they went and moved down to live with the Creeks not that long before the "Virginians" got here.
Long story short: Timothy Demonbreun was here because this was a place you could run into Native Americans and trade with them. Whether they lived here "permanently" is, as far as I can tell, a semantic argument. They were in this area all the time with established camping areas and known hunting grounds. They were here.
So, the two big markets for fur were France and Britain. In order to move your product, you wanted to have ties with one or the other or both (which is one reason you see Indians on the side of the French in the French & Indian War and on the side of the British during the Revolution: they wanted to protect their access to European fur markets). Now here's the important part: France and Britain were in competition for those furs, so they wanted to have ties to Native Americans.
French fur traders often had a home wife—a Frenchwoman he wed in a marriage recognized by the Church—and, what we might call an away wife—a Native American woman whose family was big into the fur trade (or, let's be honest, if they could get away with it, a handful of away wives). It was important to get in good with a woman in the groups they wanted to trade with because at least among the Cherokee and the Creek, all diplomatic matters were handled by women—who got to be a part of the tribe, what arrangements they might have with other villages, who they sold their furs to.
The British, specifically usually the Scottish, went one step further. They lived full time in the villages of the people they traded with and they had one wife, from that village. When Joseph Brown's family had their infamous and unfortunate encounter with the Chickamauga in 1788 down near Chattanooga, a Chickamauga guy named John Vann spoke to Brown's father in English. An Irish guy named Tom Turnbridge who lived in the village helped Joseph out when some of Chickamauga wanted to kill him. Turnbridge's wife, Polly Mallett, was a Frenchwoman who had been with the Cherokee for decades. Richard Finnelson lived across the way from Brown while he was in captivity. All these folks with European names and European fathers. None of them ever made it to Nashville before the "Virginians?" Before Demonbreun? It seems unlikely.
Thanks to European fur traders' intermarrying with the villagers they wanted to trade with and those villagers' constant fur trapping in this area, I don't think we'll ever have a definitive idea of who the first person of European descent to live in the Nashville area was.
But we may be able to safely say that Timothy Demonbreun was the first local of European descent who was happy to see us arrive.
