Text By Mary Carol Miller. Photographs by Mary Rose Carter (University Press of Mississippi, $40)
“As Natchez developed into a prosperous Mississippi River port, it attracted thousands of flatboats, which would float down the Ohio and Mississippi rivers with produce and finished goods. The crews would tie up at Natchez, carouse for a while under the bluffs, and then begin the long trek on foot back to Nashville and points north. They followed the rough Indian trails that the French labeled “tracier,” meaning track or course.
Over approximately a forty-year span, thousands of boatmen, pioneers, peddlers, and preachers would walk or ride the Trace, tramping down the earth until, in many places, the road was sunken several feet beneath the surrounding countryside. It was often a dark, dangerous journey, with few way stations and no lawmen to protect travelers from bandits and thugs.
Although no one could foresee it at the time, 1811 would be the year that the Trace began to die. Robert Fulton had perfected his model of a steam-powered boat, and Nicholas Roosevelt piloted the three-hundred-ton New Orleans down the Ohio River, into the Mississippi and straight into the maelstrom of the New Madrid earthquake. When the ship finally tied up at Natchez, it caused an immediate commotion. The crew didn’t break their boat apart and set out on foot, as their predecessors had, but simply got back on, reversed the engines, and headed back upstream.”
