Natchez, MS: We docked in Natchez with no drama, purely routine and on time. Natchez has a lot of history, including being the southern terminus of the Natchez Trace.
In the days when a common way to travel the Mississippi was flatboat or raft, people rode the current to New Orleans but had no way to take their craft back upstream. So they would sell their boat for lumber and walk or ride an animal home.
Apparently the Nashville area was where many of them wished to return to. They’d follow the river upstream to Natchez and then strike out overland taking the shortcut to Nashville. That shortcut was called the Natchez Trace. Draw a straight line from Natchez to Nashville and you have the approximate route.
They’d come down an eastern tributary to the Mississippi, perhaps the Ohio or Kentucky river. Now they needed to return there. Think of their river route as a capital gamma (Γ), they could shorten the trip by heading off to the northeast and this trail became the Natchez Trace. So many walked it, or rode a horse up it that it became in places sunk several feet below the surrounding terrain.
Today it is a national historic park, paved but otherwise maintained in a predevelopment condition. We had the opportunity to drive it in 1976, in a small motorhome. We were heading south from the DC area where were temporarily domiciled. It is a slow drive, but very pleasant and somewhat historic.
At an inn of sorts named Grinder’s Mill, Meriwether Lewis of Lewis & Clark fame died, whether by assassin’s bullets or suicide has never been conclusively established. People who knew him well were inclined to believe suicide, some have described him having bipolar disorder.
Later … We’re in Baton Rouge, LA tomorrow, good old “red stick.” I wonder where the name came from?
Much Later: The other DrC found out where the name came from. Long ago two native tribes lived in the area and to reduce confusion marked the boundary between them with a tall, red pole, festooned with fish skeletons. Upon seeing this pole the French dubbed the area Red Pole or Baton Rouge and the name stuck.
