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Along the Devil's Backbone The Natchez trace once provided the best route through Mississippi to Tennessee--if you could avoid its rouges, rascals and cold-blooded killers. By J. Kingston Pierce Gunshots echoed in the dusky Tennessee morning. First one blast, followed by the thump of a body falling on a plank floor and the exclamation, "O Lord." Then a second sharp report. Presently, a tall, broad-shouldered and bloodied man staggered from the small inn on the Natchez Trace where he'd spent the night. He called out to his hostess, Priscilla Grinder, in the adjacent kitchen-house: "O madam! Give me some water, and heal my wounds!" When Mrs. Grinder failed to respond—perhaps terrified by what she might encounter—the man blundered about the yard for a few minutes, collapsed, tried to get a drink from an empty bucket, and eventually returned to his room. His servant found him there, not long after dawn on October 11, 1809. He was conscious, but a piece of his forehead had been blown away, and another bullet had punctured his chest. The man implored the servant to take up a rifle and end his misery. "I am no coward," the wounded man moaned, "but I am so strong . . . so hard to die." Within two hours, explorer and national hero Meriwether Lewis breathed his last. He was only 35 years old. Thomas Jefferson, who'd employed Lewis as his presidential secretary before sending him with Captain William Clark on the celebrated 1804-06 trek across the Rocky Mountains to the Pacific Ocean, painfully accepted his fellow Virginian's suicide. The president recalled that Lewis "had from early youth suffered from hypochondriac affections," and he was aware that the explorer had sought to end his own life on more than one occasion.
Like many other historic routes, the Trace began as a combination of animal and Indian paths. During most of the nineteenth century, the French, British and Spanish tramped along it, all competing for control of the lower Mississippi River. From the 1780s through the 1820s, before steamboats began regularly plying the Mississippi, this backwoods highway—stretching for 450 miles between Natchez, Mississippi, and Nashville, Tennessee—saw its heaviest use. It was an essential route for people, mail and sometimes armies moving to and from the bustling port of New Orleans. Many prominent figures are associated with this road, among them Andrew Jackson, Aaron Burr, and the ill-starred Meriwether Lewis. It was also the haunt of so many thieves, assassins, rowdy riverboatmen, and malevolent innkeepers that the U.S. government posted warnings to travelers and rewards for the apprehension of malefactors. If any place in the country was then likely to spark rumor and mystery, it was the Natchez Trace. Sure enough, by the time news of Lewis's fate reached the East, the Trace was rampant with stories that the explorer—who had been on his way from St. Louis to Washington, D.C., to deliver his journals of the Corps of Discovery—was actually murdered, either by common looters or Mrs. Grinder's jealous husband. Even 189 years later, folklorists and historians still keep those theories alive, and some of Lewis's descendants endorse digging up his bones to seek evidence of homicide. It's such powerful but peculiar tales that have drawn me—and thousands of others every year—to the Trace. Only after arriving here do I realize just how significantly the trail has changed over two centuries. Much of its hoary course through hardwood forests is now covered by concrete roadbed. Most original lodgings have disappeared. However, thanks to a 1938 act of Congress, what could be preserved has been. Within the Natchez Trace Parkway, the National Park Service manages a 51,739-acre length of scenic byway with interpretive markers and refurbished heritage sites. Cutting across Mississippi, Alabama, and Tennessee, the parkway is like some stretched-out, winding museum. It showcases the history of Native Americans and Southern pioneers and offers detours to nearby Civil War-era attractions and more contemporary cultural landmarks. Naturally, the parkway also exploits the gothic legends that gave the Trace its popular nickname: "the Devil's Backbone." "Beware Pickpockets and Loose Women" reads a sign on the wall of a vintage saloon in Natchez-Under-the-Hill, a narrow landing squeezed between the Mississippi channel and Natchez proper above it on an imposing bluff. "When's the last time you saw any loose women in here?" I ask a bespectacled gent who sits alone at the bar, perusing a newspaper. "Damn sight too infrequently for my taste," he announces before guzzling the foamless dregs of his beer. Things were different back in the early 1800s, when Under-the-Hill was among the most wicked and dangerous places on the frontier, the first stop for pugnacious and boastful boat crews bound north up the Trace. Those men were mostly professional traders who transported furs, livestock, whiskey, farm produce and anything else they could get from the upper reaches of the Ohio and Mississippi rivers to New Orleans, where their merchandise was peddled off the docks or shipped off to Europe or South America. Floating tons of goods down the Mississippi atop flat-bottomed wooden vessels proved to be far cheaper and easier than hauling them overland. But, even when unloaded, these "flatboats" were nearly impossible to navigate back upriver, so most of them were simply scrapped in New Orleans for building materials, and their crews either marched or rode horseback along the Mississippi to Natchez and the Old Trace. While flatboaters didn't all hail from Kentucky, they came to be known collectively as "Kaintucks." Say that with a growl and a sneer, and you get a fair sense of how respectable Natchez folk felt toward those transients whose patronage of Under-the-Hill bordellos, groggeries, and gambling dens ensured that the district would be, as one horrified Methodist evangelist described it, a "celebrated school of every grade of licentiousness."
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