Crawling Up the Devil's Backbone

A Ghostly Pilgrimage Up the Old Natchez Trace

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It was a still, early morning when I shuffled up from the historic Under-The-Hill district in Natchez, Mississippi. As sometimes happens on a Monday evening, one had turned into two, which had turned into three, and so forth until I found myself listening to stories from an extremely knowledgeable local tour guide and carriage driver. But now, with the rising sun, all the crowds had gone and I was the only soul in sight along the river.

This “small, straggling, and shabby” area, as Mark Twain called it, was once the rowdiest port on the Mississippi River. There was “plenty of drinking, carousing, fisticuffing, and killing there, among the riff-raff of the river, in those days,” he wrote.

For many, it also marked the start of a long, arduous journey home via the Natchez Trace. After some time in town, Kaintucks, or boatmen who floated goods down the Mississippi River from states in the Ohio River Valley, would have to traverse 500 miles of wilderness. The Kaintucks would have to contend with not only the elements but also bands of criminals looking to separate them from their cash. The road developed such a reputation that it came to be known as the Devil’s Backbone.

Today, the trace is a 444-mile scenic drive that follows one of the oldest historical routes in North America. Thousands of years before cutthroats and bandits stalked the trails, the earth here was beaten low by herds of bison making their way to salt licks in Tennessee. Native Americans followed, using the paths for hunting, trade, and war. Eventually, as European settlement encroached on Native land, the area became a frontier—one that in many ways would foreshadow the Old West years later.

Glimpses of all these eras can be found along, or just outside, the Trace today—their memories held in the complex earthen mounds built by Native Americans, the once thriving frontier towns, the overgrown familial cemeteries, the decadent antebellum homes, and dozens of local legends that have survived.

Some of these legends rose to mind as I climbed the hill—soon to begin my own journey up the Trace.

“The Land is Full of Ghosts”

If Under The Hill was half the notorious den of vice Twain said it was, then I wonder how it must’ve felt juxtaposed against Natchez proper, where a grand basilica and antebellum mansions still peer down from the hill above. Before the Civil War, Natchez had the highest number of millionaires per capita in the country. The river city was a prime location for the buying and selling of natural resources, goods, and enslaved laborers.

Natchez was once home to the busiest market of the enslaved in Mississippi and the second largest in the South. The forced labor of the individuals bought and sold there funded and built many of the area’s mansions. When Union soldiers occupied the town in 1863, the 12th Wisconsin Infantry and the 58th United States Colored Infantry, which was made up of freed slaves, tore the market down.

The day before I left for the Trace, I visited this site, now known as Forks of the Road, and a few others, including Emerald Mound, which is the second largest Native earthen mound of its kind in the U.S. It would’ve still been in use as a ceremonial center when Hernando De Soto first arrived in the area in the 16th century. However, by the time the French returned, they found that the Mississippian culture, of which the Natchez, Chickasaw, Choctaw, and many other tribes had belonged to, had changed. Disease left behind by the Spanish, along with population loss and societal change, caused the use of mounds to decline.

 “To me there is no more haunted, complex terrain in America than the countryside between Port Gibson, Mississippi, and the river.” —Mississippi author Willie Morris

When I arrived, the only other visitor was a small fawn on the other side of the mound. After it disappeared, I retreated from the heat myself and made my way to the city cemetery.

I try to visit one in every city I go to, especially those with Spanish or French history. Maybe it’s the Spanish moss or the obelisks, or the angels perched atop mausoleums and pedestals, but whatever the reason, I always find stories there, local legends unique to the old burial places of the South. Natchez City Cemetery is no exception. There are a number of notable graves here, but two stand out.

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The Turning Angel monument was erected in dedication to five young women who lost their lives in a gas explosion at a local drug company in 1908. So the story goes, the statue has been seen turning its head at night to fix its gaze on passing cars. On the evening I visited, it kept its gaze pointed downward, towards the graves of the women killed in the explosion.

A short walk away is a rather normal looking grave, at least until you get up close. It holds the remains of ten-year-old Florence Irene Ford. Before she was taken by yellow fever, Ford was known to be extremely afraid of storms. So, when she passed, her mother had a small glass window placed underground at the head of the casket. Just behind the grave, a set of steps lead down to the window so that the mother could comfort Florence during storms.

“No more haunted, complex terrain in America”

The next morning, armed with a cup of coffee, I set out on the Trace towards the ghost town of Rodney, Mississippi. There are no signs to Rodney and getting there requires a dose of vintage map skills and a stop or two to ask for directions.

Mississippi author Willie Morris has said of the area: “To me there is no more haunted, complex terrain in America than the countryside between Port Gibson, Mississippi, and the river.” Morris was mostly referring to historical and figurative ghosts when he wrote that, but an hour or so in, I was beginning to understand the word choice.

After turning onto what I thought looked more like a driveway than a road, I followed it for what felt like miles. On occasion, the thick underbrush would open up and the road would crisscross another seemingly remote stretch of gravel. “Take a right, then a left; then keep right all the way,” I was told by a worker at The Old Country Store in Lorman. I did just that past pine and kudzu and cemetery and abandoned church. I drove for so long, and without seeing any other vehicles, that when I came to a fork, I (stupidly) decided to stop in the middle of the road to check the offline map.

Not even a minute later, a semi came barreling down the steep road blaring its horn. I jumped on the gas and soon the two of us were locked in a dance going down this wiry country road. While I still wasn’t sure I was going in the right direction, seeing another vehicle was reassuring, even it felt like I’d be run over if I let off the gas for a moment. Eventually, we came to another fork, and the semi turned off one way while I continued to follow the road on the other. A moment later the thicket gave way, and the forest opened up on either side.

Rodney was once one of the busiest towns on the river. Today, not much remains of the old town besides a couple of buildings, two churches, and a cemetery. A few people still live there, but the homes, along with some of the hunting camps high up on stilts, are a bit disorienting sitting next to the ruins of old churches and streets that once housed around 4,000 people. The town began to decline after a change in the course of the river, and eventually yellow fever took what will the townspeople had left to stay in the mid-nineteenth century.

Some of the buildings have slowly disappeared over the years, and the white chapel was nearly completely covered in vines and brush when I visited. The other church, which still has a cannonball stuck in it from a Civil War skirmish, was receiving renovations.

After a moment or two surveying what was left of the town, it was back to the road, using a cemetery and another abandoned church I saw on the way in as landmarks.

As surreal as it feels standing in the ghost town of Rodney, a couple of miles away, the Windsor Ruins are even more bizarre. Today, the only remnants of what was once one of the largest antebellum Greek Revival houses in the state are twenty-three towering Corinthian columns, seemingly picked up from half a world away and dropped in the middle of the Mississippi woods. During the Civil War, the house, which was built mainly by the enslaved, served as a Union hospital. It survived the war, only to burn down in a fire in 1890, leaving only the columns to delineate the home, like a chalk outline from a crime scene.

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Much of the surrounding land is covered in acres and acres of kudzu, so much so that at times it is difficult to imagine there is solid earth beneath all the vines. The only evidence of unchoked life is the occasional longleaf pine rising out of the leaves, mirroring the towering manmade columns in the distance.

After the ruins, I stopped by the Daniell-Freeland (Windsor) family cemetery just down the road, which would’ve been nearly impossible to find were it not listed on Google Maps. Set off in the woods and built on top of a Native American mound, the graves of those who used to own the house are slowly being overgrown. A collapsing brick wall surrounding the cemetery no longer keeps the trees and brush out. I didn’t linger long.

Pines, Prairie, & Pirates

I spent that night at Rocky Springs campground, right off of the Trace. Itself an abandoned town, the only thing that’s left standing are a still-in-use church and the accompanying cemetery.

This part of the Trace passes through Mississippi’s Piney Woods and Black Prairie regions, home to Jackson, Tupelo, and a dozen or more eclectic communities in between. It’s also where, according to oral tradition, the Chickasaw settled after separating from the Choctaw. The tribe, then one nation, were led by two brothers, Chiksa' and Chahta.

The migration myth says that the tribe, seeking peace after years of war, left the west, guided by a pole that was given to them by a prophet. When placed in the ground, the pole would point towards the east, until one day, arriving somewhere in the area, the pole wobbled a bit before pointing straight up into the air. Chahta took this as a sign that they’d arrived in their new homeland, while Chiksa' wasn’t fully convinced. So, he and others who had their doubts left and continued east, leading to the formation of the Chickasaw nation.

Some of the oldest Native earthen mounds along the route, the Pharr Mounds, are spread out over a ninety-acre site at milepost 286.7. The eight mounds themselves were constructed near a large village that once sat along this thriving trade route some 2,000 years ago, and remain a sacred place for modern Chickasaw.

According to Turnbow, those who traveled the Trace and couldn’t afford to arm themselves would grow out their fingernails and attempt to gouge out the eyes of anyone who tried to rob them. Some of the early accounts along the road read like something out of the Texas Chainsaw Massacre.

Further along the road, in Alabama and Tennessee, markers indicate where the Trail of Tears crossed over the Trace. Between 1830–1850, tens of thousands of Native people crossed over the ancient road after being forcefully relocated from their ancestral homelands.

When I stopped to visit a marker for the Tennessee River Water Route of the Trail, a tall storm cloud was forming on the other side of the river. Those who took this route were forced onto overloaded boats here. Some of the boats were so overcrowded that their hulls began to crack, according to an audio explainer. Sickness would’ve been common onboard. Stories of the poor conditions resulted in many groups later taking land routes. The Trail of Tears passes over the Trace in two more spots further up.

Driving through any part of the Trace can sometimes feel like being sucked into a time capsule—the lack of powerlines, sunken trails, isolated family cemeteries. But the road today is a far cry from the one Native Americans and early settlers knew.

Meriwether Lewis Campground in Hohenwald, Tennessee, towards the end of the Trace, is a stark reminder. The campground and park are home to Lewis’s tomb. While historians don’t unanimously agree on what actually happened to the renowned explorer and governor of the Upper Louisiana territory, we do know that Lewis died from a gunshot wound while staying at an inn on the Trace. Many think it was suicide; others believe something more malevolent occurred on the wild, dangerous Trace of the early nineteenth century.

“Because there was little law enforcement, because there was a lot of money, you know there weren’t a lot of banks at that time, so people had to carry the gold and silver on them—that encouraged robbers,” said author Tony Turnbow, who grew up along the Trace and has studied its history for over thirty-five years. So brazen were the “land pirates” as they were sometimes called, that there are even accounts of them taking shots at Andrew Jackson’s army as it traveled the road.

According to Turnbow, those who traveled the Trace and couldn’t afford to arm themselves would grow out their fingernails and attempt to gouge out the eyes of anyone who tried to rob them. Some of the early accounts along the road read like something out of the Texas Chainsaw Massacre.

One such story tells of a man who adopted a young Native boy. While the two were out in public, someone made a comment about the boy and before long “they’re slashing each other with their knives and they’re trying to disembowel each other,” Turnbow said. Another account tells of a man who was taken prisoner by the Natchez.  They were readying to throw him into a boiling pot of oil, but the man picked up one of their children and threw the young child into the pot, making his escape in the confusion.

“You realize how brutal it was. People who woke up in the morning never knew whether everybody in the family would still be there,” Turnbow said.

The Trace is also the home of America’s first documented serial killers. During the late 18th century, cousins Micajah “Big” Harpe and Wiley “Little” Harpe terrorized the frontier up and down the road. Historians generally agree that they were responsible for the murders of at least thirty-nine men, women, and children, but it’s possible that they took the lives of over fifty victims, some of them mere infants. Their victims were often found dismembered and mutilated. Their reign of terror finally ended after they were taken in by the Stegall family. During the night, the older Harpe killed another guest before slitting the throat of the family’s infant son. The mother walked in while it was happening, quickly becoming the next victim. When the husband returned, he found the entire cabin ablaze and quickly formed a posse to track down the murderers.

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During the chase, Big Harpe was shot, injured, and captured. When asked why he’d killed so many people, he said “because I hate the whole human race.” The husband, Moses Stegall, then proceeded to cut Harpe’s head from his body while he was still alive. It was put on a spike in Webster County, Kentucky. The crossroads is still known as Harpe’s Head. The younger Harpe escaped South, but he too was eventually caught, his head put on a spike elsewhere on the Trace.

After a night at Meriwether Lewis Campground, it was time for the final leg of the Trace, a short hour or so drive north to just outside Nashville, Tennessee.

This portion of the road, even with some clouds overheard, was bright and winding as it fell and rose and clung to the side of hills.  I stopped and pulled over at a viewpoint right after Double Arch Bridge, one of the last stops on the journey. After three days of camping on the ground, I was ready for an actual bed. In the days of the frontier, this entire route would have taken a little over a month if you were lucky. If you weren’t, then you may not have made it out at all. I stayed a bit, watching the bridge and  pondering how something so serene could have ever been so violent and deadly. 

Plan your journey on the Trace at nps.gov/natr.