The Steamboats Won

The Natchez Trace was busiest for about forty-five years, and it was busy because the Mississippi runs one way. A flatboat could carry a crop down to Natchez or New Orleans but could not be worked back up against the current, so it was broken up and sold for its lumber and the crew walked home. Steam took the reason away. The New Orleans came down the river in 1811, and in 1814 the Enterprise proved the thing that mattered, making the two thousand miles from New Orleans upstream to Brownsville under her own power. After that a boatman could ride home on a deck instead of walking beside one. The road had been the only way back and then, quite suddenly, it was not. Upstream was the thing that could not be done, and then it could.

The change took a decade and a half to finish. Steamboats were common on the lower Mississippi by the early 1820s, and by the end of that decade the Trace had stopped being a through route, though local traffic used pieces of it for generations. The stands shut, the ferries kept working for neighbours, and the road came apart into farm lanes. Two and a half miles of the original trace can still be driven, one-way and northbound, because the Park Service deliberately preserved and graded that stretch. Almost everywhere else it survives only where nobody had any further use for it. Everywhere else it survives only where nobody found another use for it.