Great Sites The Natchez Trace: A Wilderness Highway
|
1. Getting Around on a New Continent |
 A continent without
roads: that’s what the first Europeans found when they began arriving in North
America in the sixteenth century. The indigenous population, to whom the continent of
course belonged but who were about to be relieved of ownership in the bloodiest way
possible, had no need of roads. For one thing, the continent was laced with rivers,
streams, creeks, bayous. And where there were no natural waterways, paths through the
wilderness sufficed for a culture which lived close to the earth. |
| One of the first things the Europeans—accustomed as they were to the niceties of civilization—did was to start making roads. They had horses (which, remember, the Indians didn’t), and they had wagons, coaches, carriages. If the new continent was to be properly occupied and developed, a transportation system would be a high priority. |
| So daunting was the wilderness, however, that even the Europeans, with all their technological prowess were a couple of centuries in getting things under control. (Of course, if you think about rush hour traffic in any major American city, "control" hardly seems an apt word.) It was really not until well into the nineteenth century and the laying of thousands of miles of railroads by thousands of African slaves and Asian near-slaves that transport ceased to be a major difficulty. Until about 1830, while a primitive system of roads had been constructed along the east coast, movement inland relied on what nature provided (the rivers) and the Indians left behind (footpaths). |
| Development east of the greatest of the rivers, the Mississippi, was eased by the large number of natural waterways, many of which flowed into the Mississippi itself. There was just one problem. The Mississippi was so large and its current was so powerful that, while it was easy enough to go from north to south on the river, going the other direction was almost impossible. Moving goods from, say, Cincinnati on the Ohio River (see map) to New Orleans in 1800 was a snap. You just bought or built a barge, loaded your goods onto it, and floated downstream. When you got to New Orleans, you sold your goods at a tidy profit (while also selling the barge for scrap lumber). But then you had a problem. How to get home to Cincinnati? |
| For a long time, there were only two ways. One was: walk. The other: ride a horse. But where would you walk? How could you and your horse find your way overland through hundreds of miles of sometimes swampy, sometimes mountainous wilderness? |
|
| By the latter half of the 1700s, Europeans had a secure foothold on the east coast of North America and had begun edging westward over the Appalachian Mountains. Although much of the central and western part of the continent was still in the hands of the French and the Spanish, the new, English-based United States of America was beginning to think that it had a "manifest destiny," which was to occupy the land all the way to the Pacific Ocean. |
| To this end, thousand of restless pioneers every year moved farther and farther west, building farms, establishing villages, developing patterns of trade both with the Indians and with other settlers. This gradual spread of American civilization westward meant that during the eighteenth century, the Mississippi River became a busier and busier commercial thoroughfare. And that meant, more and more Americans needed a way to get back to their homes in the north so that they could gather more goods to bring south for trading. |
| Solution: The Natchez Trace. "Trace" is an old word, little used anymore, meaning a faint trail through a forest. Natchez was a town 150 miles up the Mississippi from New Orleans (see map). The early traders moving back north gradually found—and followed—a series of old, indeed, ancient Indian trails for some 450 miles northeast from Natchez all the way to Nashville in Tennessee. From Nashville there was already a road to Cincinnati, and civilization. |
| For a period of about 50 years, the Natchez Trace functioned sort of as the first American "interstate highway," encouraging and easing the movement of people about the country, though it was far from being a highway. Even at its peak of use around 1810, when thousands of people were walking the Trace every month, it was little more than a wide path. At various times between 1800 and 1830, the U.S. government hired people to widen and improve the trail, but the wilderness was so dense, that even at its best, the Trace was little more than eight feet wide, and its surface, except in the few places where boardwalks were laid over bogs, was natural dirt. As for bridges over the numerous rivers, there were none. Walkers and riders did what the Indians had done for countless millennia: if it was a small stream, they looked for a fallen tree (or they felled a tree) to walk across. If it was a river of any size, they (and their horses) swam across. Ferries began appearing only in the 1810s. |
| As for the comforts of home, for years there were none. Travelers relied on food (dried beef was popular) that they brought with them, or they would trade with the Choctaw Indians. The Indians, by the way, were peaceful, even welcoming and hospitable. Fear of wildlife (bears, wolves, snakes) was much greater than fear of the Indians. As the number of people using the trail increased in the early 1800s, "stands" began appearing here and there. A "stand" was a sort of wilderness Holiday Inn, a place to sleep and get something to eat. To say that the food and sleeping accommodations were primitive would be an understatement. Still, a leaky roof was better than no roof at all. |
| If you had walked the trail in 1800, the people walking with you (and probably you yourself!) would have looked like this (the description comes from a diary of the period): |
| "These men were dirty. Their dress, a shirt and trousers of canvas, black, greasy, and sometimes in tatters. Their skin was burned from exposure to the sun. Each had a small purse, wrapped in an old blanket. They all had beards, which added to their savage appearance." |
| Bear in mind, these would be your companions for a month at least, because it took that long to walk from Natchez to Nashville. |
| "Walk" is probably not the best verb to describe this mode of travel, for this was no "walk" in the park. In hilly or mountainous terrain, Indian trails tended to follow ridges rather than going through the valleys. Why? Because the ridges were easier to clear, they were dryer when it rained, you could see farther ahead, and they reduced the number of streams you had to cross. But ridges by their nature are part of mountains. That meant that your 450-mile walk included a lot of going up-up-up and down-down-down. Then there were the bogs and swamps. The northern half of the Natchez Trace was hilly; the southern half nearer the Mississippi River became flat and swampy. Thus other parts of your long walk actually consisted of a lot of wading through swamp water. And almost everywhere you walked was another threat, not potentially fatal but certainly irritating enough: poison ivy. |
| Even when you stopped in the evening to eat and rest, your problems weren’t over. Critters other than humans also were hungry. However threatening the wilderness animals were, what the travelers most complained about was the mosquitoes. More than one diary from the time describes how you slept. No matter the temperature, you wrapped yourself in your blanket with only your nose protruding. Sweating, you slept, and then of course you awakened the next morning to find your new, larger, red nose covered with hundreds of itchy mosquito bites. |
| In spite of such difficulties, the Natchez Trace provided a means of settlement and commerce in the area west of the Appalachians and east of the Mississippi River. But by 1830 it had virtually disappeared. What happened? The steamboat happened. As steamboats spread rapidly in the 1810s and 1820s, the return trip up the Mississippi ceased to be a problem. And people stopped walking the Natchez Trace, though it was still used occasionally as late as the 1860s during the Civil War. |
| There were naturally other "traces" in early America, though none as long or as hazardous as the Natchez Trace. Many of them survive today (though one is rarely aware of it) in the route which this or that highway follows. Not so with the Natchez Trace. Because so much of that path followed ridgelines, the path itself was never a place for settlement. Farmers wanted rich, lowland soil for their crops. When towns began to appear in the territory around the Trace, they were never along the Trace itself, but some miles down the hills or mountains away from the path, where there was good soil. Which meant that when people stopped walking the Trace in the 1820s and 1830s, it was gradually forgotten and reverted to its natural, wilderness condition. |
|
| As you probably know, all highways in the United States are numbered. Except one. That one is called The Natchez Trace Parkway. You will find it on any map of the southeast, but you will look in vain for a number. For 450 miles, the Natchez Trace Parkway follows the route of the original wilderness trail. The Parkway is in fact a national park, 450 miles long and 30 to 100 yards wide. To drive it is a unique travel experience. |
| When you enter the two-lane asphalt Parkway a few miles south of Nashville, you see a sign: |
No Commercial Vehicles Allowed. |
| Which means, no trucks. But what the sign doesn’t tell you is that it’s not only trucks that are about to disappear, it is civilization itself. The small, beautifully maintained highway meanders along the ridgelines, curving sharply left and right, up and down, following the naturally contours of the land. No trucks. No signs. No advertising. And: no towns. (Remember? the towns were built miles from the old trail.) And also very few entrances and exits to the Parkway. Which means: no traffic, only an occasional car. It is just you, the road, and the wilderness, looking exactly as it did 200 years ago. The Natchez Trace is as close to a time machine as you can find. You see squirrels, deer, birds, foxes. In the distance, now and then, a farmhouse or a barn. Otherwise, just forest, forest, and more forest. |
| Every few miles, you come to a small parking area, with a map and a description of some feature or other of the Trace. One, for example, describes the early mail service along the trail. A horseman in Nashville and a horseman in Natchez would leave on the same day, each carrying a pouch of mail. Two weeks later they would meet at the halfway point, exchange pouches, and then each would return to his city. Thus it took a month for a letter to get from one city to another. (This was a big improvement; before the Trace, it had taken three months to get a letter from Natchez to the east coast, because the only way was down the river to New Orleans and then by boat through the Gulf of Mexico, around Florida, and up the Atlantic coast to New York.) |
| Many of these turnouts along the way also provide short mapped hikes to nearby sites of historical interest: the ruins of old "stands", early farms, Indian mounds, etc. Free camping and picnic sites are also provided. In a number of places, the National Park Service has carefully restored short stretches of the original Trace, so you can get out of the car, and walk in conditions exactly like those experienced by the Indians and the early settlers (see photo). |
| A unique highway. The 20th century disappears. (When you finally leave the Trace, the return to normal, modern, commercial highways is an intense culture shock.) Though the speed limit is only 50 mph, you soon find yourself driving slower and slower as the wilderness magic seeps into you. As you drive, and stop, and explore, you get a real sense of what the continent used to be, and perhaps an appreciation for the gentleness with which the Indians inhabited it. |
| But we are now all products of a technological civilization, so as we drive the Natchez Trace, we also ponder with admiration the courage and determination required to penetrate the wilderness by those intrepid settlers swatting a million mosquitoes 200 years ago. After driving some miles south from Nashville, you follow the road up a small mountain, and at the top a vista opens before you, and your admiration for the struggles of those early people changes to incredulity. For opening out in front of you, spreading in a magnificent sweep from left to right, is the Tennessee River, flowing massively, silently between steep banks, the greatest single barrier to those long-ago pioneers. Dark, deep, silently, timelessly flowing blue water. But it is the scale of the river which gives the modern traveler pause and causes one to wonder at human perseverance. Today a graceful bridge effortlessly carries you across. But yesterday? The river, which all those thousands of walkers and riders of the Natchez Trace somehow crossed, is one mile—1.6 kilometers—wide. |
| More Information: |
| William C. Davis, A Way through the Wilderness: The Natchez Trace and the Civilization of the Southern Frontier. New York, 1995. |
| http://nps.gov/natr. The home page of The Natchez Trace Parkway. |
|
