Bonus Miles
The Old Road, If You Want The Story
The Park Service calls this corridor an avenue of travel, trade and conflict for more than 10,000 years. It began as bison paths to the salt licks of Middle Tennessee and became the road of three nations: the Natchez on the southern bluffs, the Choctaw in the middle, the Chickasaw up here. When de Soto's Spaniards demanded two hundred Chickasaw people as porters, Chickasaw warriors burned his camp to the ground in one night in March 1541, and Europeans did not try again for 150 years. The French built Fort Rosalie at Natchez in 1716, took Natchez land for tobacco, and after the 1729 revolt destroyed the Natchez nation and sold its survivors into slavery.
The American road came by treaty with the Chickasaw and Choctaw in 1801. The Army widened the footpath to a wagon road, and the soldiers garrisoned south of Franklin gave Garrison Creek, your start line, its name. By 1810 roughly ten thousand Kaintuck boatmen a year were walking home on it, four hundred plus miles, because you cannot float a flatboat upstream. Travelers called it the Devil's Backbone for the remoteness and the highwaymen. The worst, Samuel Mason, signed his robberies "Done by Mason of the Woods" and was finally killed by two of his own men for the bounty on his head.
Meriwether Lewis died on this road on October 11, 1809, at Grinder's Stand, seventy miles southwest of Nashville. Gunshots in the dark, no witness, suicide or murder never settled, a broken column over his grave at milepost 385.9. And not all the traffic chose to be there: enslaved people were marched south in coffles to the Natchez slave market until Federal troops tore it down in 1863. Steamboats killed the road, the forest took it back, and the ghost of it is what you race.
