Natchez Under-the-Hill

The Natchez Trace ended at the river. After flatboat and keelboat pilots unloaded cargo downstream, they walked north along the Trace to the Ohio River Valley. The landing below the bluff was where that trail began — a place that, by 1810, was described as "'for the size of it, there is not, perhaps in the world, a more dissipated spot.'" The area was frequented by gamblers, river pirates, highwaymen, and prostitutes. A Kentuckian arriving that year stayed at a tavern named The Kentuckian and found the main room "crowded in every corner...with sons of riot and dissipation." By 1798, when Natchez became part of Mississippi Territory, the district supported a racetrack and drew arrivals from Africa, the United States, France, Spain, Ireland, and the Netherlands. The sexton's records show that in addition to the Forks of the Road slave market outside town, slave traders operated occasionally at Under the Hill. Most of the original riverfront washed into the Mississippi. What remains is a single block on Silver Street: bars, restaurants, the casino boat. Under the Hill Saloon anchors the strip with live music most nights in a building older than Mississippi statehood. The American Queen and other paddlewheel steamboats still dock at the landing. Walk down Silver Street from the bluff. Five minutes from mansion row to the river. The distance is vertical — a measure of what split Natchez into upper town and lower, estate and trade, what endured and what the water took.