Natchez Trace in Requiem for a Nun (Location)

The "Natchez Trace" (4) was a 440-mile trail through the wilderness originally created by Indians between Nashville, Tennessee, and Natchez, Mississippi. It linked three rivers - the Cumberland, the Tennessee and the Mississippi. In the 18th and early 19th centuries, it served as a major overland route for traders and settlers. Historically, it passed through northeast Mississippi to the east of Oxford. In the early history of Jefferson the Trace links the settlement to civilization back east: although the "special horseman" who carries the mail between the settlement and Nashville rides up and down it "every two weeks" with a kind of impunity (8), the "three hundred miles" he traverses is referred to as the "rapine-haunted Trace" (10), a lawless and violent "region where for no more than the boots on his feet, men would murder a traveler" (9). In time, however, the "trackless infested forest" through which the Trace passes becomes the route of "the pioneer" who "drags his gravid wife and most of the rest of his mother-in-law's family behind him" on the march of civilization westward (81).