When I was an eighth grader, we studied Tennessee history. It was required. I became captivated. Ole Andy Jackson became my hero of heroes. John Sevier (“Nolichucky Jack”), James Robertson, and Colonel John Donelson came alive in my imagination. At the end of the year, I went to the Marshall County Library to continue my study. One book that I discovered, perhaps it was recommended by the librarian, was The Tennessee by Donald Davidson (Rinehart, 1946). I probably hadn’t noticed the subtitle: The Old River: Frontier to Secession. It turned out to be the story of a river, not the state of Tennessee. I struggled with the first chapter, more topographical than historical. I found stories and people to intrigue me, and I simply scanned sections that were more technical or more detailed than I was ready for. I never made it to the second volume: The Tennessee : The New River: Civil War to TVA.

As an undergraduate English major, living in Nashville, I found out that the author, Professor Donald Davidson of Vanderbilt University, was something of a legend in his own right. He had grown up in Campbellsville, a rural area in Tennessee not far from my own childhood home. He was known all over Nashville as a professor of the old school: he spoke with authority; he expected respect; he demanded attention; and he held fast to his firm convictions. He was a poet, but no one I knew read his poetry. He was a scholar, but undergraduates weren’t much interested in his scholarship. We knew his reputation as one of the Fugitives, the group of agrarians who had formed a literary circle at Vanderbilt after World War I: John Crowe Ransom, Allen Tate, Cleanth Brooks, Robert Penn Warren, James Merrill. It was they who had issued the Agrarian Manifesto, I’ll Take My Stand, defying modern “progress,” enunciating the “old” values. From among them, the New Critics had emerged. By the 1950s, they had moved on to other universities, other work, national reputations. Davidson alone was still at Vanderbilt, holding fast to the basics of Fugitive agrarianism, including states’ rights and racial segregation.

I knew Professor Davidson by reputation; I avoided him personally. I did not rediscover his books on the Tennessee River.

Then, years later, as a collector of Americana, especially books of regional history published during the time of renewed attention to regionalism in the 1930s and 1940s, I latched onto the series called the Rivers of America. Established by the critic/publisher Constance Lindsay Skinner, the series was designed to recount the history of North America by concentrating on development along its rivers. Among her successors as general editor were Carl Carmer and Stephen Vincent Benet. Authors were recruited for their literary reputations, not as professional historians: Robert P. Tristram Coffin for the Kennebec; Henry Seidel Canby for the Brandywine (illustrated by Andrew Wyeth); Edgar Lee Masters for the Sangamon; August Derleth for the Wisconsin; Carmer himself for the Hudson and Songs of the Rivers; and Donald Davidson for the Tennessee. Only Davidson was allotted two volumes.

Chapter xiv, “Flatboat and Keelboat Days” (one of he ones I probably would have skimmed at age fourteen) is an example of the delightful local color of these books.

“A flatboat was river transport reduced to bare essentials: a broad-bottomed, boxlike structure, perhaps with a little rake at the bow. It was steered by a board fastened to a long pole, and was steadied in the current by clumsy, oarlike sweeps on each side, call 'broadhorns.' It was built of green timber sawed from the forest near the stream and put together with wooden pins. The floor planks, two inches thick, rested on six-inch sills, on which studs were fitted to hold rafters for the roof. The roof might be gabled or round; one early observer described it as being 'like the roof of a carriage.' It covered at least half, or as much as two-thirds of the boat. The larger flatboats measured up to 20 by 100 feet and could carry heavy loads—300 to 400 bales of cotton.”

The 2000-mile trip, from the Upper Holston, by way of the Tennessee (through the Suck, around the horseshoe at what is now Chattanooga, through the Muscle Shoals in Alabama), first flowing southwesterly to northern Alabama, then northwesterly to the Ohio, thence down to the Mississippi and on to New Orleans—this long trip could be a treacherous adventure. No wonder Tennesseans became early supporters of railroads and canals and highways—in spite of Andy Jackson’s reluctance to spend federal money on them.

But that was the river as a businessman’s venue, the Interstate system of pioneer days. It was the colorful adventures along and upon the river that make exciting reading: the Cherokees and their rivals, the fur traders, the building and fall of Fort Loudon, Colonel Donelson’s sailing on the good boat Adventure to found Nashborough (now Nashville), the last stand of the Cherokees under Chief Dragging Canoe, then the Trail of Tears, the escapades and scandals along the Natchez Trace, the era of steamboats and the attempt to tame Muscle Shoals. The age of the Old Tennessee—and this volume in the series—culminated with the Secession. Tennessee’s native son, John Bell, was one of the candidates for the presidency in 1860, opposing secession. But history chose another way, and the War was on, with the Tennessee set to be one of its battlefields.

History as told by a poet can be lived as it is read. Ultimately there were sixty-five volumes in the Rivers of American series. They go all the way from the St. Lawrence to the Suwanee, from the James to the Sacramento, from the little Raritan and Pasaic to the long Missouri and Mississippi. No two volumes are alike, for no two poets write alike. Most of them begin with topography and the prehistoric formation of riverbeds; most of them zero in on the Native Americans (who often named the rivers) and the early European explorers and settlers: often they dwell on feuds and schemes and quests for fame and riches. As the writer for Wikipedia says, “The series represents one of the finest long term efforts by a publisher to blend the talents of both writers and artists to present a tribute to the rivers which played such a vital role in the development of America.”

It would be hard to choose just one book to represent this series. They are all readable, some of them page-turners. Donald Davidson’s Old Tennessee is as good a place to begin as any.

But maybe not when you’re an eighth grader.