Archaeological Survey of the Old Federal Road in Alabama

quality stones, copper and mica from the mountains, special woods for bows, and innumerable other itemsof symbolic and utilitarian value. Historic traders drove packhorses laden with deerskins and other hidesand pelts out of the interior and left behind cloth, firearms, knives, and other manufactured goods. Despitethe attention given this exchange of goods, the flow of information throughout the region was just asimportant. News travelled quickly by means of these trails, and the southeastern Indians remainedremarkably well-informed about distant events. When speed was paramount, the more astute Europeanand American officials employed native runners to carry important correspondence overland, instead ofrelying on their own ship-borne mail systems linking the colonial-era coastal towns. 3The best account of travel on the Alabama-Mobile path was written by William Bartram, aQuaker naturalist from Philadelphia, who rode this very trail during a plant collecting trip to the coast in1775. 4 Bartram accompanied a group of traders returning to Mobile from the Upper Creek towns. Theyobtained the services of a Creek guide, “to set us in the great trading path for West Florida,” and departedearly in the morning. The mild-mannered naturalist later described the “mad manner” of travel practicedby the colonial traders: “they start all at once, the horses having ranged themselves in regular Indian file,the veteran in the van, and the younger in the rear; then the chief drives with the crack of his whip, and awhoop or shriek, which rings through the forests and plains, speaks in Indian, commanding them toproceed, which is repeated by all the company, when we start at once, keeping up a brisk and constanttrot, which is incessantly urged and continued as long as the miserable creatures are able to moveforward.” 5The party crossed the area known today as the Black Belt, so-called for the black soils derivedfrom decomposing chalk bedrock. Bartram noted how a rain rendered the road “very slippery.” They thenentered “a vast open forest” that extended for seventy miles. 6 Bartram’s description indicates oneimportant fact about this stretch of country, which was part of the Creek Nation during the eighteenth andearly nineteenth centuries. While many Indians and colonists were very familiar with the trail and thelands it crossed – and, indeed, local guides were essential if visitors like Bartram hoped to avoidbecoming lost – oddly enough no one lived along the trail. Once travelers left the Upper Creek towns,they would find no local residents to provide food, shelter, a fresh horse, or other assistance until theyreached the native and colonial settlements ringing the Mobile-Tensaw delta, some 150 miles to thesouthwest. No wonder European traders traversed this land they deemed “wilderness” as quickly as theycould.While much of this path followed the high ridges between drainages, which eased travelimmeasurably and surely must account for the trail’s long popularity, there were some places where24