Natchez Trace History

If you had taken a trip down the Natchez Trace when it first opened, you might have been a bit frustrated. Those mastodons were real road hogs. In those days, 7,000 or so years ago, between the mastodons and the giant bison pounding out the trail, the passing lane could be a nightmare. Later, as the game grew smaller, and the Native Americans of pre-history arrived, you'd have needed speed and stealth to just to keep up with the hunt. Later still, a few arrowheads would have stood you in good stead as the tribes formed, Chickasaw and Choctaw among them, and trading along the route picked up. But after the conquistadors came, you could forget that simple arrowhead. Hostilities between Native American raiding parties and white travelers became everyday occurrences, as did the stick-ups by robbers and thieves who preyed on the rough and tumble Kaintuck boatmen who floated down the Mississippi River to sell their goods and flatboats in New Orleans, then walked back home on the Natchez Trace. The Devil's Backbone-that's what the Trace was called back then, and for good reason.


Of course, if you'd traveled the Trace at that time, you might have met some interesting people, like John James Audubon sketching birds, or Aaron Burr hatching conspiracies. Or Andrew Jackson, whose army marched down the Trace to win the Battle of New Orleans, then marauded its way back up, when Thomas Jefferson cut off its funds. Jackson also took his new bride honeymooning on the Natchez Trace-a trip that proved scandalous when it was discovered she wasn't quite divorced from her first husband at the time!
And while it was dicey in those days to honeymoon on the Natchez Trace (Andrew and Rachel went with a party of 100 people, just for safety), if you had wanted to honeymoon on the Trace in the early part of the twentieth century, you would have found it even tougher going, since by then disuse and incorporation into local thoroughfares meant there was hardly any road to be found. The Natchez Trace might have disappeared without a trace, but thanks to legislation introduced during Franklin Roosevelt's administration, the Natchez Trace National Parkway was created, 444 miles of breathtakingly scenic road running from Natchez to Nashville. Construction wasn't easy; it took 67 years from start to finish, but then again, given the true age of the Natchez Trace, that's barely a moment in time.

Today all those eons of rich history are still in evidence along a roadway offering up mile after mile of splendid natural beauty. Forget ugly billboards and crass commercialization, the vistas here are as unspoiled as they were in centuries past-minus, of course, the mastodons and the galloping highway robbers.