With all his ability and industry, and with the-best of intentions, John Clemens would seem to have had an unerring faculty for making business mistakes.  It was his optimistic outlook, no doubt—­his absolute confidence in the prosperity that lay just ahead—­which led him from one unfortunate locality or enterprise to another, as long as he lived.  About a year after his marriage he settled with his young wife in Gainsborough, Tennessee, a mountain town on the Cumberland River, and here, in 1825, their first child, a boy, was born.  They named him Orion—­after the constellation, perhaps—­though they changed the accent to the first syllable, calling it Orion.  Gainsborough was a small place with few enough law cases; but it could hardly have been as small, or furnished as few cases; as the next one selected, which was Jamestown, Fentress County, still farther toward the Eastward Mountains.  Yet Jamestown had the advantage of being brand new, and in the eye of his fancy John Clemens doubtless saw it the future metropolis of east Tennessee, with himself its foremost jurist and citizen.  He took an immediate and active interest in the development of the place, established the county-seat there, built the first Court House, and was promptly elected as circuit clerk of the court.

It was then that he decided to lay the foundation of a fortune for himself and his children by acquiring Fentress County land.  Grants could be obtained in those days at the expense of less than a cent an acre, and John Clemens believed that the years lay not far distant when the land would increase in value ten thousand, twenty, perhaps even a hundred thousandfold.  There was no wrong estimate in that.  Land covered with the finest primeval timber, and filled with precious minerals, could hardly fail to become worth millions, even though his entire purchase of 75,000 acres probably did not cost him more than $500.  The great tract lay about twenty nines to the southward of Jamestown.  Standing in the door of the Court House he had built, looking out over the “Knob” of the Cumberland Mountains toward his vast possessions, he said: 

“Whatever befalls me now, my heirs are secure.  I may not live to see these acres turn into silver and gold, but my children will.”

Such was the creation of that mirage of wealth, the “Tennessee land,” which all his days and for long afterward would lie just ahead—­a golden vision, its name the single watchword of the family fortunes—­the dream fading with years, only materializing at last as a theme in a story of phantom riches, The Gilded Age.

Yet for once John Clemens saw clearly, and if his dream did not come true he was in no wise to blame.  The land is priceless now, and a corporation of the Clemens heirs is to-day contesting the title of a thin fragment of it—­about one thousand acres—­overlooked in some survey.