Sheboss Place

One of the stands on the old Natchez Trace stood somewhere in a corner of Hickman County, and it was known as Sheboss. The Park Service tells the story as legend, which is the right register for it. A widow named Cranfield kept the inn with a second husband, a Native man who spoke little English, and when travellers rode up and asked whether they could get a bed, a meal or corn for the horses, he would say nothing, point at his wife and answer "she boss". The building is gone, the family is untraced and the exact site has never been established, but the name outlived all three of them and is still on the map. Three words are the whole of what the place left behind. Every stand on the Tennessee road has gone the same way except one.

For the first few years the stands were not open to white keepers at all. Under the two treaties of 1801 that let the road be cut, the Chickasaw and the Choctaw held the right to run the ferries and the inns along it, which is why John Gordon's ferry on the Duck River had to be a partnership with a Chickasaw chief rather than a business of his own. The nations relaxed that in 1805 and independent stands followed quickly, so most of the ten or so known in Tennessee date from after it. They stood close together, about a day's walk apart, and a day's walk was some dozen miles for men carrying what they ate. Travellers wrote about them unkindly and consistently. Few even got a bed.