THE NATCHEZ TRACE

Nashville, TN is a great and storied American city. Many people think of it as the country music capitol of the US but as it has grown and diversified, it has become more liberal and complex. Today it is a large American city made up of many moving parts. Its lively food culture was on display when we ate at one of the greatest restaurants of this trip called Husk.

Its beer/party/football culture and Evangelical preachers were roaring the next morning as we drove by pedal powered, beer-guzzling partiers and angry Bible-thumpers on the street.

Our Prius with California plates seemed a little out of place here, so we made a quick exit for our next destination. The Natchez Trace is a 440-mile National Scenic Parkway that travels south from Nashville to the northwestern corner of Alabama. It then cuts a diagonal line across the entire state of Mississippi ending at a little jewel of a town called Natchez. The trail was created by Native Americans over hundreds of years and was later used by early European and American explorers, traders, and emigrants in the late 18^th and early 19^th centuries. The rise of steamboats on the Mississippi eventually caused the Trace to lose its importance as a national road and large parts of it were eventually abandoned.

This old trading route travels through four eco-systems from the foothills of the Appalachia mountains to the Mississippi River. Traveling southwest, it gradually becomes dryer and more like the American West. But eventually, it changes to become more humid and lusher, like the American South.

On our previous leg of this journey, we experienced the beauty of Monticello and the enigma of Thomas Jefferson’s life. We also experienced the sorrow of nearby Charlottesville and the courage of public library that helped the community during their troubled times. The Natchez Trace has seen its share of hard times as well. Meriwether Lewis, of the Lewis and Clark Expedition, committed suicide while traveling on the Trace while governor of the Louisiana Territory. And at several places along the Trace, Native Americans on the infamous Trail of Tears crossed this path during their forced evacuation of their homelands in the early 19^th century.

But we came here to experience the surprising beauty of a part of our country neither of us had ever seen. Hernando de Soto traveled through here in 1542 on his way to being the first European to cross the Mississippi River. This environment has changed so much since then that we struggled to catch a glimpse of what the first Europeans must have encountered while traveling through here.

On our drive through the lush forests of the Trace we did come upon several sites of pre-contact Native American mounds including the National Historic Landmark called Emerald Mound dating from between 1200 and 1730 CE. The platform mound is the second-largest Mississippian period earthwork in the country after Monk’s Mound in Cahokia, IL. The place was awash in the beautiful warm colors of sunset, and we were alone at this haunting and quiet site. A deer surprised us as it scampered away from near the top of the mound into the forest.

We thought back to some of the massive structures built by the Native People of Mexico that we had visited last Spring. They seem to have the same function and similar look as the mounds we had seen along the Trace. The Southeastern part of the US had a large mound building culture within the Indigenous tribes of this region. It seemed to indicate there was something of a shared culture among some of the tribes of pre-contact Native America before the Europeans came in and messed everything up.

After driving through Tennessee and Alabama, we broke up our long drive by spending the night in Tupelo, Mississippi. This town is in the heart of the massive New Deal water project called Tennessee Valley Authority or TVA which reshaped the hydrology of this region. It was the first city to receive power from the TVA. Tupelo is better known as the birthplace of Elvis Presley.

Continuing the Trace, we came upon the Cypress Swamp area. This beautiful area contains a large stand of water tupelo trees and cypress that can live in deep water for long periods. A trail led us to an abandoned river channel which is gradually filling with silt and will eventually replace this exotic, spooky forest with other trees such as sycamores and maples.

At another surprising place we came upon was the Sunken Trace This is a portion of the deeply eroded or “sunken” part of the Old Trace. Here, the relatively soft, wind-blown soil interacted with thousands of walkers, riders, and wagons to wear down this part of the path. It was a haunting demonstration of the human impact on the geology of this area over a long period of time.

We drove the entire length of the Trace rarely seeing the presence of other people. Near the end of the second day, we exited the Trace to get gas in the small Mississippi town of Port Gibson. It is the third-oldest European-American settlement in Mississippi. It was founded by the French in 1729. In the 1830s, after forcibly removing the Indigenous inhabitants, planters imported thousands of African American slaves from the Upper South. Up until the Civil War, most of the people living in this area were slaves. During the war, it was occupied by Union forces and General Grant declared the town “too beautiful to burn” which spared the wonderful old buildings we see today. Waves of immigrants came through here after the war including a group of German Jews. Their fascinating old Moorish Revival synagogue with a Russian-style dome still stands today along with a suprising new library. The town’s population is now mostly Black and mostly poor, but its history speaks to long history of the region.

Finally, we ended our journey along the Natchez Trace in another beautiful old town called Natchez. Located on a bluff high overlooking a large swath of the Mississippi River, it was a prominent city in the antebellum years, a center of cotton planters, slave trade, and Mississippi River trade. It too was spared destruction during the Civil War. As the sagging economy has become increasingly dependent on tourism, we could see the shift to emphasizing Natchez’s fascinating past and preserving its architecture for the future.

Next stop on our long drive across the country will be border region between Texas and Mexico. Stay tuned…