The Devil's Backbone - Jonathan Daniels

The Devil’s Backbone  - Jonathan Daniels

When we were researching our Mississippi River bike trip one of our locations was Natchez Trace National Park.  This historic trail is now an excellent drive and bike and one of the true swaths of beauty in the south.   It is also very significant to the Mississippi River.  In Abraham Lincoln’s youth, his father had to walk back up the Trace after taking a boat down to New Orleans.  Before steam and other inventions allowed upstream travel boats were loaded and the sold – first the goods and then the boat itself which was dismantled for lumber and construction.

Over the years the characters of the American West – the notorious General Wilkinson and the strong minded Andrew Jackson were regulars on the Trace.  It was where Lewis met his demise after his success on the trail and then his appointment by Jefferson to a position at St Louis. There were outright criminals that worked the trail and terrorized the travelers and there were shady characters like Aaron Burr.  The stories are about slaves and ex-slaves, Indians, pioneers, road agents, and road houses.  It is an intriguing combination that ties in with the river itself and the business at Natchez which was the real crossroads of the region.

I wanted to learn the story of the Natchez Trace and this book which was first published in 1962 was recommended.  It was a good choice, but you do have to realize when it was written and then you can understand some of the less than PC descriptions that occasionally appear in the text.

The author wanders from the path to the river and even across the river with episodes of Spanish, French, English, American intrigues and he covers a broad swath of the history when this was the America West and across the river was another country.

It was a good choice and the quotes below will share some of the tales:

“this trail which DeSoto crossed ran northward 600 miles from the loess bluffs above the Mississippi where the Natchez tribe of Indians performed bloody rites at White Apple Village.  This was to be the site of the town of Natchez.  Through the wilderness the path twisted across the lands of the Choctaws and the Chickasaws.  Its northern terminus was in the game-rich hunting grounds of many tribes in Tennessee.  There settlements on the Cumberland River were to grow into the city of Nashville.”

"with the French and Indian War in America, rule of the Mississippi River Valley passed, in 1763 from Louis XV to George III"

"They came in a variety of boats.  There were canoes after the Hiawatha northern, birchbark fashion.  There were others, called pirogues, hollowed fromt he trunks of big trees and fastented together with heavy planks.  There were bateaux, light, flat bottomed boats tapering towards the ends, and skiffs, light enough to be rowed.  More important were the faltboats.  They were called arks, Kentucky boats, New Orleans boats, and most often, broadhorms.  Their only means of porpulsion was human muscle and the current of the river.  They varied greatly in size, from 20 - 60 feet in width.  They cost about three or four dollars for each foot in length and were generally sold for lumber at their downstream destinations.  Some of them had pens for cattle, horses, and swine."

“Already there were some who, according to an early Mississippi saying considered ‘a barrel of whiskey a week but a small allowance for a large family without any cow.”

"Natchez-under-the-Hill, a mile-long flat below the bluffs, was sternly described as 'a stale sordid sodden place.'  Still, with a vividness which sometimes reflected fascination through indignation, travelers reported its congregation of 'whores, boatmen, gamblers, bruisers' frequenting 'barrooms and gambling hells' and brothels reeking with the smell of dirty men and women, of garbage, and river muck."

"Operating a floating house of prostitution, [Annie Christmas] was reported to be 6 feet 8 inches tall and able to handle in a fight or a bawdy frolic the toughest flatboatmen on the river."

"In October, 1801, only a few American Soldiers at Chickasaw Bluff guarded the strategic heights from the Spaniards across the wide river. It was still Chickasaw country, though [Andrew] Jackson's partner, John Overton, had a trading post there. Twenty years later Jackson and Overton, as real estate promoters, called the site 'Memphis' 'on the American Nile.'"

"On October 12, 1802, 'the right of deposit of American produce' was suspended by the Spanish government at New Orleans.  That closed the port to American Mississippi trade.  Once more General Wilkinson was at the center of explosion.  That suspension, supposedly at the inspiration of Napoleon, who had secured a treaty for the return of Louisiana to France, clamped a cork back into the bottle of the expanding West." 

"Not without reason did the Spanish call the men who came down from Mississippi, Tennessee, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Kentucky 'barbarians.'  At the end of their journeys they 'caroused, played practical jokes, swarmed into bordellos, gawked in the churches, cluttered up the already filthy city with their rubbish, blustered through crowds shouting lusty oaths, and in general disrupted life.' " The Devil' Backbone - Jonathan Daniels

“Down the Trace General Wilkinson did very well, too.  He was present at the peaceful transfer of Louisiana to the United States at the Cabildo in New Orleans on December 20,1803.  The departing French prefect, Pierre Clement Laussat, reported to Paris about the pompous general, “already known in a bad way, is a flighty and rattleheaded fellow, often drunk, who has committed a hundred impertinent follies.” Describing General Wilkinson who drove Jefferson crazy, was involved with the Trace, is suspected in history of being a double agent for Spain, a friend of Aaron Burr and otherwise an all around scoundrel who seemed to find a way to survive along the Mississippi. 

"In the character of a national hero, Lewis had huried to Washington.  There, as one reward, Jefferson appointed him to succeed General Wilkinson, whose presence in St. Louis ws no longer pleasing to so many, as governor of upper Louisiana.  It was no plum that the President gave Lewis."

“…the roughest among them began to talk with admiration of how rugged the walking Jackson was.  He was tough as hickory, some said.  And Tennessee settlers knew which wood was toughest.  Thereafter, his name in affection became then and forever, “Old Hickory.”