Page:Historic towns of the southern states (1900).djvu/525

 salt spring, known thereafter as the French Lick. In 1775, Timothy De Monbreun, a native of France, visited the spring, and later settled near the site of Nashville. Occasionally adventurous hunters and trappers passed down the valley. In 1778, a man of singular courage and gigantic stature named Spencer came with a party from Kentucky in search of homes and fortune, and settled near Bledsoe's Lick, north of the Cumberland. They planted a small field of corn. Spencer's companions soon became discouraged and returned to Kentucky, but this self-reliant hunter, undismayed by the solitude of the wilderness and the fear of the crafty Cherokee, refused to leave his new home in the lonely forest, and passed the long winter there, with only a great hollow sycamore tree as a shelter.

The story of the founding of Nashville is full of heroic incidents. It reads like a romance. About ten years had elapsed since the stout-hearted pioneers of Virginia and the Carolinas had pushed their way westward through the blue ridges of the Alleghanies, and planted an independent colony upon the banks of the Watauga River. Its master spirits, John Sevier, James Robertson and Isaac and