Natchez Trace
The Natchez Trace was a road winch ran,
in the early days of our history, from Natchez, Mississippi, to
Lexington, Kentucky, passing through Nashville, Tennessee, on
its way. In a strict application of the term only that part of
the road lying between Natchez and Nashville could be called the
Natchez Trace, the northern half of the road from Nashville to
Lexington having the name of the Tennessee Path.1
This road originated as did most of the roads of the pioneer
period: it was first of all an Indian trail leading from village
to village and, as such, formed a thoroughfare for occasional
Indian war parties and for the more regular communication of
trade that was by no means lacking among them. Between Natchez
and Nashville lay the villages of the Choctaw Chickasaw nations
and these two allied peoples used the road in common. The use
made by the Indians of the northern half of the road was
appreciably less and for reasons that are fairly obvious. There
was some use made of it, however, and southern Indians went
north and northern Indians went south over the entire course of
the road. White travelers began to frequent the road after 1763
when the southwest passed, into British hands, and after the
opening of the Mississippi in 1705 the road became one of the
main traveled highways of the western country.
For the Natchez Trace owed it's Importance, as paradoxical as it
may seem, to the Mississippi River, or rather to its commerce.
The exports of the back country, all that country lying west of
the Alleghanies, found a market in New Orleans and the highway
thither was the Mississippi River and its tributaries. This down
river trade to New Orleans is a part of our history too well
known to need description here.2
There is 110 denying the volume of this trade or the interest
taken in it by the western people. From January to July of each
year the Ohio and Mississippi rivers thronged with the boats
carrying the western produce to market. Barges, flat boats, keel
boats, New Orleans boats and arks, all these and many more were
pressed into service to carry the increasing commerce. It has
been estimated that two thousand men were employed in this trade
each season, some proprietors of the boats they "sailed'' on,
and some laborers hired for the trip, and some professional
boatmen who lived by their trade. These boatmen came from as
many different regions as the cargoes did, but at New Orleans
they were called Kentuckians, and the name was certainly not
given as a compliment.
It is important to bear in mind that this river commerce was a
one-way trade; before the coming of the steamboat there was no
practicable method of up-river navigation. The consequence was
that when the cargoes were sold at New Orleans, the boat had to
be sold or else knocked apart and sold for lumber. As for the
crew, it had to find its way back to the up-country the best way
it could. There were two ways open for a return. If the crew was
from Pennsylvania or the more northern tributaries of the Ohio,
the easier and shorter way home was to take shipping to
Baltimore or Philadelphia and then walk overland.3
But by far the more common way back north from New Orleans was
by the Natchez Trace. It was a journey through the wilderness
for a distance of more than eleven hundred miles and required
forty or forty-five days to make the trip.
The boatmen returning from New Orleans generally organized
themselves in informal groups of all sizes and composition.
Fifteen or twenty was considered a view large company and as a
rule the groups were much smaller, depending on the number of
men ready at the time for the trip. It was a rare thing for a
traveler to venture the journey alone. As for transportation,
the boatmen, if they could afford it, bought at New Orleans or
Natchez the Indian ponies that had been brought there for sale
from Texas or New Mexico, and rode them home.4
These small roan ponies could be bought for fifty dollars each
but when it is remembered that the ordinary pay of boatmen in
those times was only sixty dollars a trip it will be seen why
many of the crews walked back. Here at least they could justify
the latter half of the boatman's proud boast that he was ''half
alligator and half horse."' It is a matter of record that those
who walked reached home generally about as soon as those who
rode ; and if we can trust the testimony of a traveler who
speaks with the fervor of personal experience not much more
comfort was to be had in riding these Indian ponies than
walking. Walking or riding, the boatmen always took the
precaution before leaving Natchez to lay in a good stock of
provisions for the trip, biscuit, flower, bacon, dried beef,
rice, coffee and sugar.5 It was the
custom also to take along for each man one pint of Indian corn
roasted and ground to a powder; this was designed as an
emergency ration in case of a delay on the road. One spoonful of
this powder would enable a man to exist for a day without other
food.6 To be sure provisions were to
be had along the road at the Indian settlements and the
plantations of the white pioneers, but there was a space of
several hundred miles where no settlement of any sort was to be
met with. When provisions could be obtained, they were not of a
very appetizing nature, consisting for the most part of hard
bread and cheese relieved occasionally by mush and milk and
fried bacon. Whenever the travelers secured any food on the way,
however, they were certain to pay an enormous price for it.7
Whatever else the boatmen might take along in the nature of
food, there was one thing that they rarely forgot: an adequate
amount of corn whisky or apple brandy.8
And not only was it necessary for the travelers to take thought
of their food supply before leaving Natchez but they needed to
provide themselves with suitable clothing. The journey was
usually made during the summer months and so very little in the
way of clothing was required: the regulation suit was one of
brown overalls so coarse and thick that it would resist the
action of the briers and thorns that beset the trail for much of
the distance. The costume was completed by a pair of heavy shoes
and any kind of a hat that the roving fancy of the boatman might
select.9 Over his shoulders he slung
his canteen of the capacity of two quarts and with a pair of
pistols in holsters before him he might well feel himself
equipped for the long journey. As for the horses, the boatmen
always saw to it that they were fresh shod before leaving
Natchez. Hobbles were invariably taken along for the double
purpose of preventing them from straying at night and of keeping
the Indians from stealing them. Corn was carried along for the
horses notwithstanding the fact that they could be depended on
to subsist on the wild grass along the way and were known to eat
the bark of the trees with great relish.10
Thus equipped a party of boatmen could start out on the long
Natchez Trace with a reasonable certainty of arriving at
Nashville in fifteen or twenty days. If the party was on
horseback there would generally be an extra horse taken along
for every two or three persons and carrying nothing but baggage,
tents and provisions and the not inconsiderable weight of silver
dollars received at New Orleans in payment for their produce.11
For the first sixty miles the Trace ran roughly parallel to the
Mississippi and through a country that was comparatively level.
There were infrequent settlements along this part of the road
and practically no danger from the Indians. The chief difficulty
in travelling here was to be found in the 'dirty little creeks'
that so often and so thoughtlessly crossed the Trace. These were
often not fordable and as there were no, ferries or bridges the
boatmen had to unload their horses of their baggage and make
them swim across.12 Sixty-two miles
from Natchez was the last white settlement on the road till
Nashville was readied; this was Grindstone Ford over the Bayou
Pierre. The remainder of the road was through Indian country and
the boatmen kept a scout in advance about a quarter of a mile to
observe signs of trouble. As a matter of fact, however, there
was very little danger from Indians on the Trace unless they
were met with when they were drunk. This was quite likely to
occur, for both Chickasaw and Choctaw were inordinately fond of
the flowing bowl and were in the habit of dedicating themselves
to inebriety with a scientific fervor now quite lost to the
world.13
Not far beyond Grindstone Ford lay the ''Forks of the Road".
Here a trail ran off to the right to the Choctaw villages while
the Trace bore to the left through the Chickasaw country. The
"big town" of these Indians was a five days journey over a road
that grew constantly worse every mile of the way. It was a ridge
road, as Indian trails most always were, and followed along the
divide between the Yazoo and the Tombigbee rivers.14
Briers and thorny bushes grew close to it on both sides making
it necessary for the travelers to go in single file. Fallen
trees were quite often found across the road so that progress
was very slow; boatmen felt that they were making good time if
they averaged thirty miles a day. If there were moonlight nights
the party would be likely to do much of their travelling by
night and stay in camp during the heat of the day. Abandoned
Indian camps were numerous along the road and the boatmen tried
to make their camps in these places whenever possible because
they were generally open sites and situated near the water, a
commodity which it was difficult to find anywhere along the
Trace from Natchez to Nashville. If the party was fortunate
enough to have tents, they slept under them; if not, they slept
under the open sky with their saddles or perhaps their knapsacks
for their pillows. Corn was fed to the horses, hobbles were put
on them and they were turned loose for the night. The members of
the party took turns in preparing the meals and also in standing
watch, for though the Indians were not bloodthirsty they were
experts at robbery. Scouts by day and watches by night were
needed, however, not so much for protection against the Indians
as against the outlaws of all colors who operated along the
Trace. The most notorious of these outlaws was Samuel Mason, who
carried on his depredation along the Natchez Trace from
1801-1803 after a particularly malodorous career on the Ohio
River.15
Some thirty miles before the ''big town" of the Chickasaws was
reached, the travelers on the Trace passed through a smaller
settlement of the same people. It was made up of only three or
four huts along a little creek at the foot of a hill with a
little tobacco plantation behind them and some com fields
surrounded by a bush fence. From this place on to the "big town'
there were along the Trace many Indian plantations abandoned for
the most part by the owners but with the orchards of peach trees
and apple trees still standing. The ''big town" itself was the
principal village of the Chickasaw.16
It was situated in a large open valley and consisted of the wood
huts of the Indians straggling along both sides of the Trace.
There were extensive cornfields around it as well as tobacco
fields and the inevitable orchards of apples and peaches. Here
the travelers could with confidence expect hospitality such as
the Indians were able to give. More often than not, however,
they would be more in need of food them-selves than able to
supply other people with it.
Forty miles from the Chickasaw village the Trace crossed the
Tennessee River. The river at this place was deep with a very
rapid current and it was impossible to ford it. A ferry boat was
operated here by a half breed named Colbert and if he was in a
good humor he would ferry the travelers across charging them one
dollar a head. Some indication of the amount of travel on the
road is to be seen in the fact that Colbert had a steady income
of two thousand dollars a year from his ferry boat alone. By the
treaty that the United States made with the Chickasaws and
Choctaws in 1801 the right of establishing ferries and taverns
along the Trace was expressly reserved to the Indians, and this
in practice meant the half breeds.17
The seventy-five miles of road between the Tennessee and Duck
rivers ran through a country that was even more exasperating
than that to the south of the river. When it ran along the
ridges it was inconceivably rough and when it crossed the bottom
lands it sometimes disappeared almost altogether in the swampy
canebrakes. Sometimes the road bed would turn to thin mud so
deep that the horses would have to swim through it. It was such
places as these that Lorenzo Dow, once travelling over the Trace
dubbed with true ministerial unction "hell holes."18
Every traveler over this section of the road bore fervid
testimony to the strength and ambition of the mosquitoes. Duck
River was fordable and once over it the Trace struck boldly into
the mountains that made up most of the fifty nines to Nashville.
Generally the travelers had to dismount at this stage and get
along the best they could on foot through a sandy soil that
played sad havoc with their feet if they had not been careful in
their choice of shoes before leaving Natchez. Ten miles from
Nashville the Trace crossed Harpeth River and the widening road
as well as the tracks of cows and horses announced the nearness
of a settlement. Five miles from Nashville lay the plantation of
Mr. Joslin, the first house of a white man since Grindstone Ford
was left five hundred miles behind.
At Nashville the parties of boatmen and other travelers
generally broke up. The worst part of the road was behind them
now and there was no longer any need of travelling together for
the sake of protection: along the Kentucky trail nothing more
fearful was to be met with than solitude. Some of the travelers
would go off east on the Knoxville trail and very many others
would want to linger for a while amid the metropolitan pleasures
of Nashville after fifteen days exclusive communion with nature.
For all these reasons the trail to Kentucky was quite generally
travelled singly or in small groups; the preparation for the
journey and the routine of travelling was much the same as on
the southern section of the road.
The north bound traveler followed the road out of Nashville
through Mansker's Lick, and stopped for his first night, if he
could, at Major Sharpe's plantation twenty-nine miles from
Nashville and just across the Kentucky line.19 For
thirty-three miles after leaving Major Sharpe's the road ran
through an uninhabited country till Big Barren River was
reached. There was a ferry over this river operated by an
Irishman named McFadden who was in the habit not only of setting
the traveler across the river but also of providing, for a
consideration, food and lodging overnight for man and "baste."
North and south of this river lay the notorious "Barrens" of
Kentucky concerning the desolation and danger of which every
returning boatmen had doleful stories to tell. It was thinly
populated, the house of McFadden being the only one for
seventy-five miles on the road. There were no trees here as
along the other sections of the road and the trail ran through
grass that grew three or four feet high. Straggling bushes
showed their heads above the grass, matted over quite often with
wild grape vines. The Barrens derived its name from the absence
of trees and every traveler had his own theory of why the
Barrens were barren. As good as any, perhaps, is 'that of
Michaux who thought that the Indians had cleared the land in
order to tempt the buffaloes to come in and eat the grass. The
chief objection to this theory is that it credits the Indian
with some one hundred per cent greater aptitude for manual labor
than he ever actually displayed. In March and April there were
apt to be grass fires over the Barrens and these were real
dangers to travelers on the road. In case they were caught in
one of them there was nothing to do but start one of their own,
exactly as the hero of the Prairie did.
Forty-three miles of travelling through such a country as this
brought the traveler to Little Barren River where there was a
single house occupied by the ferryman. Thence the road ran on in
a northeast fashion across Green River and the Rolling Fork and
finally came to Danville. If the boatmen were from Ohio they
would in all probability follow the Maysville road to the Ohio
River and thence home. At Danville, too, they could connect with
the Wilderness Road. In any event, their journey through the
southern wilderness was at an end when they reached central
Kentucky.
The importance to Kentucky of the Natchez Trace lay in the fact
that it was the favorite way home for the boatmen; returning
from New Orleans and Natchez. Its value was the value of the New
Orleans trade. From 1795 when the navigation of the Mississippi
was opened, until the coming of the steamboat around 1812, was
the period of its greatest prominence. Then it was the great
highway of the west from south to north. It was over the Natchez
Trace that within this period the western country drew in its
supply of currency from the outside world, most of which it
passed on in due season to Baltimore and Philadelphia. Some
little commerce, there was southward over the road; Lexington
sent to Tennessee by this route the surplus goods she received
from the east but such a trade would never have justified the
existence of the road. We find, however, Kentucky's interest in
the road persisting far down in the century. In 1812 there is a
resolution adopted by the Kentucky legislature instructing their
senators and representatives to work for the opening of a
connecting road from the trail at Duck River directly to New
Orleans. In 1828 we have another resolution asking Congress to
extend the National Road through Kentucky to connect with the
Natchez Trace.20 Several acts of
the legislature deal with the improvement of the Kentucky end of
the road. It would seem that Muldrough's Hill was the stumbling
block on the road for in 1821 the legislature appropriated $1000
for its improvement; ten years later a company is incorporated
to build a road over the Hill; in 1839 the legislature solemnly
closes the road at this point, it evidently having gotten beyond
the reach of redemption.
For the more southern countries the Natchez Trace was not only a
boatman's road but an immigrant road as well. Much of the
immigration into the interior of Alabama and Mississippi found
its way along this road. It was perhaps with an eye to this
coming immigration as well as to the convenience of the boatmen
that in 1801 Jefferson sent James Wilkinson, Benjamin Hawkins
and Andrew Pickens as commissioners to negotiate with the
Indians for the improving of the old trace through their lands.
In two separate treaties the Indians were induced to cede the
road provided they keep the ferries and tavern under their own
control.21 The government more than
once appropriated money to keep the road repaired but with very
little effect. As was to be expected, it was along the Natchez
Trace that the first settlements grew up in Mississippi and
Tennessee. Some of the most prominent of these were Washington,
six miles from Natchez and the old capital of Mississippi;
Greenville, twenty-four miles from Natchez where Jefferson Davis
went to school and Andrew Jackson plied his occupation as a
Negro trader; Port Gibson at the old Grindstone Food and many
another.22
In olden times it was somewhat the fashion for European tourists
to extend their travels through the back country and to publish
accounts of their wanderings. From these sources we have many
accounts of the road and of the adventures to be met on it. It
was the ambition, too, of every normal boy in the west in those
early days to take a trip on a boat to New Orleans and then walk
home over the Trace, and thousands of people made the journey
for the adventure of it. Jefferson Davis came over it to
Kentucky when he was a boy. Old Hickory led his army over it to
Natchez in 1812 and led it back again. Lorenzo Dow travelled it
many times from Lexington southward in his revival campaigns in
the west and classified it as one of the trials of the
adversary. Meriwether Lewis died on it as he was returning home
from his western expedition and has his monument standing there
now in the middle of a county named for himself.23
Last but by no means least the fast riding John Morgan rode up
and down it throughout the Civil War.
But the glory of the Trace departed with the coming of the
steamboat. There was no further need, now, for the boatmen or
any others to walk or ride overland through the wilderness and
the Barrens. The steamboat was a better and not less romantic
way of traveling. And so although the old road continued to be
used it disappeared from the western consciousness as an
essential highway. Like many another old road it still exists in
parts. In some places the modem macadam road has been built over
its course; and often the Trace itself still winds through the
forests and is in use every day by people who know nothing and
care nothing for its history.
Footnotes:
1. For a consideration of
the Natchez Trace from Natchez to Nashville see a Thesis Offered
for the Degree of Master of Arts, University of Wisconsin, 1914,
by R. G. Hall.
2. Transportation and
Traffic on the Ohio and Mississippi before the Steamboat" in
Mississippi Valley Historical Review. June, 1920.
3.
These sea trips that the boatman made in returning home perhaps
furnished the inspiration that eventually brought about the
building of ocean going ships by the people along the Ohio and
its tributaries.
4. Michaux, F. A. Travels
to the West of the Alleghany Mountains, 1801-1803. Volume III of
Thwaites' Early Western Travels.
5. Baily, Francis. Journal
of a Tour in the Unsettled Parts of North America ill 1796 and
1797 by (London, 1856.) This is by far the best account of
travel over the Natchez Trace in the early days.
6. ibid.
7. The American Pioneer
(Cincinnati, 1842) I, No. IV. Ch. viii. At the crossing of the
Tennessee River the half breed ferryman sold corn to the
travelers at three dollars a bushel.
8. Ibid.
9. Baily, Journal of a
Tour.
10. Mules were quite often
used by the returning boatmen for the carrying of the luggage.
11. This money was
commonly sewed up in raw hide bags and thrown in with the other
baggage. Practically every returning party carried considerable
sums of money back with them and the securing of this money was
the particular purpose of the robbers along the path. For this
reason it was always closely guarded when the party was encamped
for the night.
12. Baily, Journal of a
Tour.
13. Practically every
traveler who went over the Trace had some story to tell of
meetings with drunken Indians. The Indians had the customs of
importing whisky at appointed times and calling the entire tribe
together for huge drinking bouts.
14. Vivid descriptions of
this road are to be found in Baily, Michaux and Lorenzo Dow.
15. The career of Samuel
Mason and the other outlaws of the West is the theme of a book
on the subject soon to be published by Otto A. Rothert,
Secretary of the Filson Club of Louisville.
16. This Big Town was
situated on the headwaters of the Tombigbee and trails Jed from
it in every direction to Memphis, to Mobile, to Charleston. The
last named was perhaps the most famous of all the Southern
trails.
17. This Colbert was a
descendant of the Scotchman who had joined the Chickasaw and had
become a chief among them. He had left four sons, all of whom
became chiefs. The romantic story of the Colbert's is told by
Mrs. Dunbar Rowland. "Marking the Natchez Trace" in publications
of the Mississippi Historical Society, Vol. XI.
18. This eccentric
missionary travelled the Natchez Trace and the other Southern
Trails repeatedly in his revival campaigns and tells the story
of his wanderings in The History of a Cosmopolite.
19. Andre Michaux. Travels
into Kentucky, 1793-1796 in Thwaites* Early Western Travels.
20. Acts of the General
Assembly of Kentucky.
21. American State Papers,
Indian Affairs, I, 652 and 658.
22. Publication of the
Mississippi Historical Society. XI.
23. Swain, John. "The
Natchez Trace" in Everybody's Magazine, September, 1905.
AHGP Tennessee
Source: Tennessee Historical Magazine,
Volume 7, The Tennessee Historical Society, 1921
|
