James Robertson (June 28, 1742 – September 1, 1814) was an American explorer, soldier and Indian agent, and one of the founding fathers of what became the State of Tennessee.

Robertson worked with his siblings on their family farm and had limited formal education, but he learned to track and hunt animals and know his way in the woods and waterways.

The party discovered the "Old Fields" (lands previously cultivated by generations of Native Americans) along the Watauga River valley, where Elizabethton, Tennessee later developed.

Robertson's skillful diplomacy made peace with the irate Cherokee, who threatened to expel the settlers by force if necessary.

The treaty was technically illegal since only the government could have formal transactions and purchase land from Native American tribes.

(The British, the colonial governments of Virginia and North Carolina and, later, the United States, all forbade private purchase of land from Indians).

After Henderson's Transylvania Company had bought Kentucky (although other tribes such as the Shawnee also claimed it), Daniel Boone was hired to widen the Indian path over Cumberland Gap to facilitate migration by Anglo-American pioneers.

In the spring of 1779, during the Revolutionary War, Robertson and John Donelson founded Fort Nashborough, later to become Nashville.

[4] Robertson's great-granddaughter, Medora Cheatham, married Telfair Hodgson Jr., the treasurer of Sewanee: The University of the South and a developer of Belle Meade, Tennessee.