The Natchez Trace
In the Early 19th Century, It was a Path of Trade and Commerce.
The Natchez Trace is a path that runs about 500 miles from Natchez, Mississippi to Nashville, Tennessee. It also links the Cumberland, Tennessee, and Mississippi Rivers.
The Trace has a long history, stretching many hundreds of years. American bison, more commonly known as buffalo, were among the first “trailblazers.” The great lumbering beasts went north to find the salt licks in the Nashville area, trampling down the undergrowth in the process.
Later, Native American Indians followed, until it was wide enough for a man and horse to travel on—remarkable for the time. A good part of the Trace goes though today’s state of Alabama. In historic times the Trace went through the lands of the Choctaw and Chickasaw. It was said that Hernando De Soto, the Spanish conquistador, followed part of the trace in the 16th century, and General—later President-- Andrew Jackson used the Trace to get to New Orleans during the War of 1812.
Thomas Jefferson and the Natchez Trace
Around 1800 President Thomas Jefferson became uneasy at the increasing influence of the French in the Mississippi River region, an influence that would culminate in Napoleon’s seizure of Louisiana Territory from the Spanish. Jefferson felt that the Natchez Trace—made a post road, improved and widened—would check French ambitions by establishing an American “path” into the Mississippi. After the Louisiana Purchase in 1803, the French danger receded, but American farmers still needed to go down the Mississippi with their crops.
The U.S. Army began work on the Trace in 1801, and by 1809 it was good enough to allow horse and wagon traffic. Farmers in Kentucky and Tennessee floated their produce down the river on flatboats to sell and transship in New Orleans. In those early years, The Trace was mainly used by farmers and traders going north, towards home. Flatboats were “one way” transportation, depending on the Mississippi current to go downriver. After selling their produce, many farmers would then walk home via the trace.
The Natchez Trace in Its Heyday
During its peak years, roughly around 1810, as many as 10,000 people trudged back home on the Trace. In spite of the Army “improvements,” it still was a rough wilderness trail that was not for the faint hearted. The Trace meandered through canebrakes, bordered swamps, and plunged into thick hardwood forests. The Trace was noted for its rough way stations and inns, with such colorful names as Buzzard Roost. A “guest” in one of these places might spend the night fighting with bedbugs and fleas. But vermin wasn’t the least of a traveler’s woes—the Trace was so bandit infested, it was called the “Devil’s backbone.”
The Mystery of Meriwether Lewis
The Trace’s most enduring mystery involves Meriwether Lewis, the famed continental explorer of Lewis and Clark fame. Lewis, then Governor of Upper Louisiana, was on his way to Washington via the Trace in 1809. He was acting strangely, and his health was poor. In fact, some advised him not to travel the Trace, since it was too harsh a wilderness for a man in such poor condition. Lewis, stubborn and erratic, insisted on going. Some modern researchers feel he was in the last stages of syphilis.
Lewis arrived at a wilderness inn called Grinder’s Station on the afternoon of October 10, 1809. He was accompanied by two servants, two pack horses, and about $100 in cash. Mrs. Grinder, the innkeeper’s wife, left a detailed but sometimes contradictory account of Lewis’s last hours.
The governor was agitated, pacing up and down in his room after everyone else had retired. Mrs. Grinder heard a shot, then another, finding the explorer mortally wounded with two bullet wounds. Later, she claimed she found Lewis trying to “cut himself” in an apparent effort to finish the job. He died a few hours later, and most accepted the verdict of suicide. But some modern researchers feel it was a craftily constructed assassination, arranged by corrupt government officials who feared he would expose them.
The End of the Natchez Trace
The Trace rapidly declined in the 1820s, partly because steamboats could make the trip easier and faster. By the 1830s, the Trace was a memory, and most of it was swallowed up once again by nature. Today, the National Park Service’s Natchez Trace Parkway commemorates the historic trail.
Sources:
David Devoss, “End of the Road” Smithsonian magazine May 2008
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