The Totally Sketchy Reason That I'm Fascinated by Stories About the Natchez Trace

This is from Outlander,
but it totally fits the vibe

The Natchez Trace is a road that runs roughly from Natchez, Mississippi, up through Nashville,
Tennessee. Back in the olden days, it was mostly a one-way road for travelers. Here's why: once people got past the mountains, most commerce flowed down the Ohio and Mississippi Rivers. Going upstream—heading east—was brutal. So, if you were a farmer in Kentucky, Tennessee, or Ohio—basically just past the Alleghenies or Appalachians—everything you made went down the rivers to Natchez or to ports in New Orleans. From there, it got shipped around the Gulf of Mexico (yes, the fucking Gulf of Mexico), around Florida, and back up the East Coast by boat.

So, people would float their goods down the river, sell everything, and then walk back home—on the Natchez Trace. That means the Trace was full of stories. Masses of people trudging through the wilderness, walking huge expanses of land. Pirates and sketchy characters on the way down, and even more likely, highwaymen on the way back, since you were walking home with pockets full of money.

Now here’s the part that’s sketchy as hell, and why I think about it so much.

Let’s say you’re a farmer in Kentucky around 1810. You and your wife and kids spend the year harvesting crops. But to make that crop portable and valuable, you probably distill it into whiskey. You barrel it up. Then you go out into the woods, chop down a bunch of trees, and build a raft—maybe with a little shack on top. You float that raft down the river, not just to sell the whiskey, but also because you can sell the raft itself as hardwood lumber to someone building something down in New Orleans.

But here’s the part that gets dark: you might keep that shack for a couple of days. And you might set it up on the riverbank, and—here’s where it turns—start saying, “Hey, anyone wanna fuck my wife for a dollar?”

So yeah, prostitution. For some extra spending money on the long walk home.

And I said "wife," but honestly? It was probably pretty often a daughter. Which is horrifying.

What a weird country.

Jedediah asked his sister to come this time, too