\

Wanderung 11

A Tantalizing Taste of the Texas Tropical Trail

January-February 2006

Sunday, February 12th, 2006 - Driving from Lafayette, Louisiana to the Natchez Trace Parkway in Mississippi.

Having satisfied our curiosity about Cajun culture, we recommenced our homeward journey after about a one-hour delay to change a flat tire on the trailer. I was very happy that the tire had gone flat while we were camped so that I could once again change it in the comfort of our campsite. We decided to head north to the Natchez Trace Parkway because some campers on Padre Island had given us a brochure about it that looked intriguing. The first leg of the day's drive was north on Interstate 49 to Alexandria, Louisiana, and then we turned east on Louisiana Route 28 to head toward Natchez, Mississippi where the parkway begins. As we drove toward Natchez we found out that we both disagreed with the state's designation of "scenic" roads. We thought that the Route 28 section through wooded hills was quite scenic although it was not marked so on the state map, whereas we found the section of US 84 leading over to Natchez to be a pretty ordinary tour through farmland even though the state map had it marked as scenic. It just goes to show that sometimes what is scenic is in the eye of the beholder.

But almost anybody would probably describe the Natchez Trace Parkway as scenic. It was a beautiful two-lane, limited access road with no commercial traffic and continuous vistas of unspoiled woods, streams, farms, and even the occasional bayou. The woods were mostly hardwood forests with some conifers mixed in, and although the trees were bare as it was still winter, I imagine it would look magnificent during the fall foliage season. The basic structure of the parkway reminded me of the Blue Ridge Parkway running from Shenandoah National Park in Virginia to the Great Smoky Mountains National Park. The speed limit was only 50 miles per hour, but that suited me just fine and we drove slowly enough that we could easily pull over for each of the historical or informational markers Basically, the Natchez Trace Parkway follows the course of the old Natchez Trace, which was a footpath linking Natchez to the Tennessee Valley river basin about 500 miles to the northeast. The path was already a known route in Colonial times and probably dates back into the prehistoric period when it was a network of Indian paths. In 1801 President Jefferson recommended making it an official road, and doing that helped tie together the frontier at the western edge of the United States.

I had first heard about the trace while reading songs and stories of the Ohio boatmen who would take cargo rafts down the Ohio River to the Mississippi and then drift south to New Orleans to sell the cargo. Since there was no practical way of returning the rafts upstream against the river current, the boats where broken up to be sold for lumber and the boatmen had to hoof it back home. Most of them walked the 500 miles from Natchez to the present day Nashville area to return to their farm or get ready for another trip, and that walk took them about a month. I suppose it was just a job to them, but drifting down the Mississippi in the days before steamboats still seems pretty romantic to me.

Driving the parkway was in one sense driving through history. The oldest part of that history is the mound building Indian tribes that predated the Natchez Indians, living in the area from around 1200 AD to 1600 AD. We saw two quite different mounds built by these very industrious people. The first was Emerald Mound, a very large platform that in its heyday would have had ceremonial temples and other important religious sites on it. The mound was really huge, and to think of those people essentially leveling off a hill and creating all the temples using only stone tools was just amazing.

The second mound was a burial site and had no platform but rather a gradual slope upward to a peak. Excavations had indicated that it was a burial site, and apparently the death of a big chief had caused a large number of his slaves and servants to also be killed and buried with him. It was probably a similar idea that the Egyptians had for providing service in the afterlife, but I much preferred the Egyptian use of clay figures for those servants rather than having to murder a brace of innocent people.

The heyday of the Natchez Trace was after the War for Independence and before the development of commercial steamboat travel on the Mississippi and Ohio Rivers in the 1820s. During that period the trace was essentially a wilderness highway that had very crude inns spaced roughly a day's walk apart along the way. The only one still remaining was the inn at Mount Locust, which has been beautifully restored to its 1820s appearance. We looked into the central dinning room that had a table set just as if the folks had gotten up and left a short while back. A back bedroom was decked out as a little girl's bedroom complete with dolls in a toy cradle, a hoop to play with, and a summer sunbonnet.

Even the pantry had a full collection of the bottles and containers necessary for feeding the folks who would have been traveling by. The front or main bedroom would have also been the master's office, of course, and there we found a secretary equipped with a ledger book and a quill pen. All together it was quite obvious that someone had taken a lot of time and effort to make that part of the history of the Natchez Trace come alive.

With a 50 mph speed limit plus all the stops we made, we worked our way up the parkway very slowly and finally ended up at Rocky Spring Campground shortly before sundown. The campground was deserted aside from a family camping in a van, so we just used a pull through site directly across from some nice bathrooms.

The advantage of the federal campgrounds is that they are free, but the corresponding disadvantage is that aside from the bathrooms there are absolutely no services of any kind. But by this time we were used to dry camping, so we leveled the trailer, turned on the propane heating system, cooked dinner, and settled in for the night. Since we kept the trailer's thermostat set at 60 degrees to conserve propane and the battery, we had to adjust our lifestyle to accomodate the chill. After dinner we quickly changed into pajamas (with thermal underwear in my case) and hopped into bed so that we would be warm enough to read our book for a couple of hours before going to sleep for the night.

Copyright 2006 by R. W. Holt and E. M. Holt
Prolog Map Epilog

January 06
Sun Mon Tue Wed Thu Fri Sat
1 2 3 4 5 6 7
8 9 10 11 12 13 14
15 16 17 18 19 20 21
22 23 24 25 26 27 28
29 30 31
February 2006
Sun Mon Tue Wed Thu Fri Sat
1 2 3 4
5 6 7 8 9 10 11
12 13 14 15 16 17 18
19 20 21 22 23 24 25
26 27 28

Return to the Wanderungs Homepage.
Sign the Guestbook or Read the Guestbook.
Comments about this site? Email the Webmaster.
Contact Bob and Monika at bob_monika@hotmail.com.