Tracing Natchez (July/August 1988 | Volume: 39, Issue: 5)

Tracing Natchez

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Authors: The Editors

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July/August 1988 | Volume 39, Issue 5

 

Natchez, Mississippi, is the oldest permanent settlement on the Mississippi River; it had more millionaires in pre-Civil War days than anywhere else in the United States but New York, and more than five hundred of the handsome houses with which Natchezians glorified themselves and their town still stand. High on the bluffs above the river, Natchez proper was considered the healthiest, pleasantest, and most genteel place to live in the whole region, while at the same time its lower, scruffier section, two hundred feet below on the riverbank, known as Natchez-under-the-Hill, was described by travelers of the time as a “most licentious spot” and the “nucleus of vice upon the Mississippi.” Natchez is also the terminus of the most heavily traveled road in the old Southwest, the Natchez Trace.

On a recent visit I approached this city of superlatives via the Trace, now a serene, lovely parkway, beautifully planted and maintained for leisurely driving free of commercial traffic. It is punctuated by historical markers and sites that tell the road’s story.

The story is an old one. Indians originally walked the paths that in the eighteenth century gradually became a continuous route over 550 miles long from Nashville, Tennessee, to Natchez. The Trace—partially mapped by the French as early as 1733—was trampled out by pioneer settlers of the Ohio River valley who floated their produce downriver in flatboats to sell in Natchez and New Orleans. In those presteam days the easiest way to get home was to walk, so they sold their flatboats for lumber, stocked up for the trip to Natchez, and set off on the slow journey home.

Primitive hostelries, called stands, sprang up along the route to accommodate the travelers, and one of them, Mount Locust, survives today, restored to its 1800 condition by the National Park Service.

The Trace was also a magnet for thieves, who hid in the woods waiting to rob flatboatmen returning home, often with their year’s incomes in their pockets. The Mount Locust guide assured us, however, that the Trace’s reputation for wickedness has been exaggerated. By 1810, eight to nine thousand peoplepostriders, soldiers, itinerant preachers as well as the Kaintuckswere traveling the Trace during the summer months, making it too public for uninhibited thievery.

Sections of the original Trace are still visible—beautiful, quiet, and rather eerie—and a five-minute walk along the old route, often deeply eroded by feet and time and closed over at the top by trees, makes it easy to imagine how weary the walkers must have been, trudging for weeks through swamps and heat, plagued by mosquitoes, and wary of both Indians and bandits.

After the first steamboats appeared on the Mississippi in 1812, the flatboat-men found it easier and safer to go home by water. By 1830 the Trace had once more become a quiet forest lane.

The flags of five different nations have flown over Natchez during its lifetime. The French first settled the area, naming it after the