Customer Reviews

A Way Through the Wilderness: The Natchez Trace and the Civilization of the Southern Frontier

5 star:		(0)
4 star:		(3)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

I worked on the Natchez Trace for two years and I had a hard time finding any scholarly information until I discovered this book. It was a godsend. It was one of the few things around that actually had footnotes! The more popular "Devil's Backbone" is awful-a good story, but no sources noted, making it impossible to follow up on what was factual and what wasn't. This book is well laid out; rather than chronologically, it was thematic, which worked well for me as a tour guide. Davis also did a great job debunking some myths, such as the number of people murdered by outlaws on the Trace. If you read any "stories" about the Trace, do yourself a favor and read this as well, for a little perspective.

Few books have been written on the Natchez Trace. Of those books, most focus on the lurid background of the roadway or on its current scenic beauty. This book provides a well-researched, scholarly, yet extremely readable look at the history of one of the Nation's most interesting early roadways. I highly recommend it for anyone interested in the Natchez Trace. Susan E. Richardson

One of the more idyllic days I have spent was a quarter century ago driving down the Natchez Trace on a glorious spring morning. About a decade later I saw this book and, prompted by fond memories of a carefree interlude, bought it. But work intervened and I never got around to reading it. Well, my plans are to return to the Natchez Trace in mid-April, so I unshelved this now 15-year-old book and finally read it. A WAY THROUGH THE WILDERNESS turns out to be not so much about the Natchez Trace as the "Old Southwest" or what, between 1798 and 1817, was the Mississippi Territory (comprised by most of what became the states of Mississippi and Alabama).

The Trace (or "trail") ran between Natchez, on the Mississippi River, and Nashville, on the Cumberland River. It was an overland route, through what in the late eighteenth century was largely wilderness, that formed a hypotenuse between the middle Ohio River Valley and the lower Mississippi River Valley. Its chief use was as the return route for river men and traders who floated goods down the Ohio and Mississippi Rivers for sale in Natchez and New Orleans. (In 1828, a 19-year-old Abe Lincoln and a friend took a flatboat loaded with pork down the Mississippi River to New Orleans, where they sold the hogs and the boat, and then returned to Indiana by walking 450 miles back up the Trace. He repeated the venture two years later.) But important traffic also moved the other direction, including mail service and other means of transmitting news from the "Boston-D.C. corridor" in the days before the telegraph.

A WAY THROUGH THE WILDERNESS consists of fifteen chapters, each entitled with a different ending to the phrase "The Road to . . ." (e.g., "The Road to the Fields" about agriculture in the Old Southwest, or "The Road to God" about religion, or "The Road to Rule" about politics). Those titles are a little too gimmicky for my taste, but in fact Davis organizes his material rather deftly. All in all, he does a fine job of giving a comprehensive overview of life in the Old Southwest between about 1780 and 1835. The book is very much popular history, but it is sound popular history and it is rather well-written for popular history.

At the center of the book is Natchez, Mississippi. I previously was unaware of how prominent Natchez once was. Davis writes that by 1850 Natchez had more millionaires than any other city in the nation (many of those fortunes based on cotton) and that by 1830 "no other community of its size in the nation could match [its] scientific and philosophical output".

But, as the book underscores, the wealth and culture of Natchez was an exception; most of the Old Southwest was roughhewn, rough-and-tumble Frontier. As Andrew Jackson left his home to emigrate to land near the north end of the Natchez Trace, his mother gave him the following advice: "You are going to a new country, and among a rough people; you will have to depend on yourself and cut your own way through the world. Never tell a lie, nor take what is not your own, nor sue anybody for slander or assault and battery. Always settle them cases yourself!"

If you are looking for a book that focuses primarily on the Natchez Trace, I suspect that there are better options out there. If you want a book about the Old Southwest or Mississippi Territory, however, I suspect that there are few better than this.

I like the majority of William C. Davis works but this work is not a good effort. It does not even begin to focus on the Natchez trace, does not adequately describe the impact of the city of Natchez on the early Southern frontier, ignores the separateness that characterized early southwestern America and barely touches on the existence of another road, the Military Road from Charleston to Mobile to New Orleans that had just as much impact on the settlement and development of this portion of the early southwestern United States. Whew, that was a mouthful!

Unfortunately, these are the high points of this book. The book is poorly written, disorganized and follows no chronological sequence. If you are interested in the fascinating history of early Mississippi, Alabama and Georgia, consider The Old Southwest, 1795-1830 by Thomas D. Clark and John D. W. Guice. It appears that many passages of Davis' book are lifted directly from it.