Natchez Trace

The Natchez Trace, a 440-mile-long path extending from Natchez, Mississippi to Nashville, Tennessee, linked the Cumberland, Tennessee and Mississippi rivers. It was a traditional Native American trail and was later also used by early European explorers as both a trade and transit route in the late 1700s and early 1800s. Today, the trail has been commemorated by the 444-mile-long Natchez Trace Parkway, which follows the approximate path of the trace.^[1] The trail itself has a long and rich history, filled with brave explorers, dastardly outlaws and daring settlers. Parts of the original trail are still accessible.

Origins of the Natchez Trace

Largely following a geologic ridgeline, prehistoric animals followed the dry ground between the salt licks of central Tennessee to grazing lands southward and the Mississippi River. Native Americans used many early footpaths created by the foraging of bison, deer and other large game, who could break paths through undergrowth. In the case of the Trace, bison traveled north to find salt licks in the Nashville area.^[2] After Native Americans first began to settle the land, they began to blaze the trail further, until it became a relatively (for the time) well-worn path traversable by horse in single-file.

The first recorded European explorer to travel the Trace in its entirety was an unnamed Frenchman in 1742, who wrote of the trail and its "miserable conditions", though it may have been traveled in part before, particularly by famed Spanish explorer Hernando de Soto. Early European explorers depended on the assistance of Native Americans—specifically, the Choctaw and Chickasaw. These tribes and others, collectively known as Mississippian, had long used the Trace for trade between themselves.

Development and Disappearance of the Trace

By 1800 Thomas Jefferson sought to counter growing French influence along the Mississippi Valley. To foster communication with the Southwest, he designated a postal road to be built between Daniel Boone's wilderness road, ending in Tennessee, and the Mississippi River. To emphasize American sovereignty in the area, he decided to call it the Columbian Highway. Treaties were signed with the Chickasaw and Choctaw tribes. In 1801 the United States Army began blazing the trail, performing major work to prepare it as a thoroughfare. The work was first done by soldiers reassigned from West Tennessee, then later by civilian contract. By 1809, the trail was fully navigable by wagon. Critical to the success of the Trace as a trade route was the development of inns and trading posts, referred to at the time as "stands." For the most part, the stands developed southbound from the head of the trail in Nashville.

Many early American settlements in Mississippi and Tennessee developed along the Natchez Trace. Some of the most prominent were Washington, the old capital of Mississippi; "old Greenville", where Andrew Jackson plied his occupation as a slave trader; and Port Gibson, among others.^[3]

By 1816, the continued development of both Memphis and Jackson's Military Road, a direct line to New Orleans, Louisiana from Nashville, began shifting trade both east and west, away from the Trace. As author William C. Davis (United States) writes in his book A Way Through the Wilderness, it was "a victim of its own success." With the dawn of steamboat culture on the Mississippi, the Trace became obsolete. In 1830, the Trace was officially abandoned and began to disappear back into the wilderness.

http://www.nps.gov/natt/index.htm
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natchez_Trace