Car Guy Magazine Car Guy Magazine Issue 914 | Page 34

ROAD TRIPS
Natchez Trace Parkway
How would you like to drive on a road
for over 400 miles and not encounter one
stoplight? The Natchez Trace Parkway road
is not only beautiful and historic, but is also
significant by its total absence of traffic lights,
stop signs and billboards. It is the road you
dream of while stuck in rush-hour traffic. The
only catch is a fifty mph speed limit that is enforced with enthusiasm.
The beauty, the history, and the leisurely
pace makes this road ideal for the relaxing
trip. If you do this road on a motorcycle you
will also enjoy one of the smoothest roads
you have traveled.
The Natchez Trace Parkway took about
sixty-seven years to complete and runs
from the most beautiful antebellum town in
the south of Natchez, Mississippi, 444 miles
northeast where it terminates just southwest
of Nashville, Tennessee.
For over 8,000 years, depending upon
which historian you want to believe, and long
before the Romans engineered the Appian
Way, this “trace” (or path) has been traveled

T H E D E V I L’ S B A C K B O N E

by both man and beast. Bandits, thieves, and
cutthroats over its history are one of the reasons this trace became known as “the Devils
Backbone.” The other reasons were the daily
discomforts one confronted while traveling
the trace: swamps, heat, flood, wild animals,
poisonous snakes, disease-carrying insects,
foul drinking water, and unfriendly natives.
American Indians and wild animals
used this trace from the dawn of time in
North America. Europeans entered the picture when Don Hernando de Soto and his
Spanish soldiers happened upon the trace
in 1540. De Soto was to die along this trace
without finding any of the gold he was seeking. To prevent his body from falling into the
hands of the Indians, it was buried in the “Father of the Waters,” better known today as the
Mississippi River. Little did de Soto know that
the gold he could not find would be carried
on the trace years later as payment for goods
that the Kaintucks sold down river and then
took home with them.
The heyday of trace travel was between

Swamps are scattered along the Natchez Trace Parkway,
and you can stiop and wander around – if you dare.

1778 and 1820, when Kaintuck boatman
traveled by flatboat down the river and returned home on foot up the trace. The flatboats the Kaintucks maneuvered down the
Mississippi River from the Ohio Valley could
be as long as sixty feet, had enough space on
top for an animal stable, living quarters and
a storeroom for cargo destined for New Orleans. Three men were needed to navigate
a flatboat down the river. The river’s current
provided the power. All that was needed
for steering was a way to keep the flatboat
in the middle of the river and away from the
rocks and shore. The current of the river and
no means of self propulsion in the flatboat
doomed the flatboat to be sold for the val