In the mid-1700s an explorer named Timothy Demonbreun became the first recorded fur trapper/trader in Middle Tennessee, bartering for pelts with sometimes-hostile Indians in a wilderness now called Nashville.
Fast-forward a couple of centuries to another Tennessee trapper, Clarence Dies, who carries on a fading frontier tradition in a cyber-optic world.
Unlike Demonbreun, Dies doesn’t have to risk his scalp – just hypothermia, an aching back and flak from animal-rights activists, all amid a dwindling price of fur…