Ebook: Voyage of the Adventure: Retracing the Donelson Party’s Journey to the Founding of Nashville

n the harsh winter of 1779, John Donelson loaded his family and thirty slaves into a 40’ flatboat at the present site of Kingsport, Tennessee. Their journey into the wilderness led to the founding of a settlement now known as Nashville—over 1,000 river miles away. In the fall of 2016, photographer John Guider retraced the Donelson party’s journey in his hand-built 14 1/2’ motorless rowing sailboat while making a visual documentation of the river as it currently exists 240 years later.

This photo book contains more than 120 striking images from the course of the journey, allowing the reader to see how much has changed and how much has remained untouched in the two and a half centuries since Donelson first took to the water. Equally significant, the essays include long-ignored contemporary histories of both the Cherokee who Donelson encountered and the slaves he brought with him, some of whom did not survive the journey.

Guider, a professional photographer, has created images of every point in the thousand-mile journey from a platform just a few feet above the waterline of three of Tennessee’s most notable rivers.