The Rivers That Made Tennessee

If you look at a relief map of Tennessee, the rivers explain almost everything. The state is shaped by water in ways that determined where people settled, which towns grew into cities, and where the armies marched. The Tennessee River rises from the confluence of the French Broad and the Holston at Knoxville, bends south into Alabama, then curves back north and west across the width of the state, joining the Ohio at Paducah, Kentucky.

It drains a basin of about forty-one thousand square miles, reaching into seven states. The Cherokees called the Tennessee the Long Man, a river that never slept, whose body stretched from the mountains to the sea and whose head only the mountains knew. The Cumberland rises in southeastern Kentucky, crosses the state border into Tennessee, swings through Nashville in a broad S-curve, and eventually rejoins the Ohio a few miles above the Tennessee's own mouth.

It was the Cumberland that carried the first generation of American settlers into Middle Tennessee, and it was on the Cumberland that Grant and the Union gunboats converged in February of eighteen sixty-two to capture Fort Donelson, the fort that opened the Confederate interior to Union forces and made Ulysses Grant famous for the first time. To the west, the Hatchie and the Forked Deer and the Obion meander through the flat bottomland of West Tennessee toward the Mississippi, which forms the entire western border of the state. Cotton culture followed those rivers.

Blues music followed the cotton culture. Tennessee has no seacoast and no mountains that reach the continental divide. What it has are rivers, connecting it east to west, north to south, linking the mountains to the great interior valley.

The water made the state before the state had a name.