Winter of 1779 to 1780 brought a party led by James Robertson overland and John Donelson's flotilla of flatboats up the Cumberland to meet them at the bluff, and you are near the heart of the settlement they began. They named the settlement Fort Nashborough, for Francis Nash, a Revolutionary War general from North Carolina who had died at the Battle of Germantown in 1777. The founding was not peaceful: the settlers were encroaching on land that the Chickasaw, Cherokee, and Shawnee nations had inhabited for generations, and the early decades of Nashville's existence were marked by continuous violent conflict over that land.
By 1806 the city was incorporated; by the 1820s it was a substantial commercial and political center positioned at the intersection of river trade, road networks, and the westward expansion of the cotton economy. The Nashville that exists today — honky tonks and hospitals, universities and recording studios, bachelorette parties and Baptist churches — grew from that contested winter camp on the Cumberland bluff. The river is a few blocks east.
The bluff is still there. The history is still underfoot.