Short answers, pulled from the story.
The name Tennessee comes from a Cherokee village named Tanasi. The river appeared on French maps in the late 17th century with names like Caquinampo or Kasqui before evolving to its current name by the late 18th century.
The Tennessee River forms at the confluence of the Holston and French Broad rivers in present-day Knoxville, Tennessee. It flows into the Ohio River at Paducah, Kentucky after traveling through multiple states including Alabama and Mississippi.
The first major battles of the American Civil War occurred along the river in 1862. General Henry Halleck considered the Tennessee River more significant than the Mississippi during the western theater of the war.
An erroneously conducted survey in 1818 set the actual border line approximately one mile south of the 35th parallel defined by Congress in 1796. This placed the disputed portion of the river entirely within Tennessee despite Georgia's attempts to resolve the issue since the 1890s.
The river has been dammed nine times since the 1930s by Tennessee Valley Authority projects. These dams created associated lakes such as Kentucky Lake and Lake Barkley which support navigation for more than 13,000 recreational craft each year.