The Natchez Trace by James A. Crutchfield

Obviously, Colbert didn’t consider his practices at the river to be stealing. George Colbert, by Dorothy Carter McDonald, in Lore of the River, by William Lindsay McDonald. We don’t want any preaching in this country. Indians never know how to steal until white man learn them. As he reportedly told a traveler, “Kentuckian bad people, and white man worse than Indian everywhere, though they have much more preach and learn much. He spoke good if unschooled English and dressed in western clothes, but wore his hair long around his shoulders, and rejected cultural destruction in the form of the white man’s education, missions, and whiskey. An “artful and designing” river pirate according to his many detractors, Colbert was equally comfortable in the role of influential tribal chief. George Colbert, also known as Tootemastubbe, was perhaps the most well-known of a set of famous half-Scotch, half-Chickasaw brothers. Just what made Colbert’s Ferry so maddening? No mystery there. Travel on the Natchez Trace, where Meriwether Lewis lost his life on October 11, 1809, was rough and dangerous enough, but crossing the Tennessee River on George Colbert’s ferry added another dimension of aggravation and humiliation - not to mention high prices.įor decades, Colbert’s Ferry was one of the most famous landmarks on the Natchez Trace. Ornithologist Alexander Wilson, a close friend of Lewis’s who went to the Trace to try to investigate Lewis’s death and see to his decent burial, explodes in his journal about the ferry the way we might vent on TripAdvisor about an airline mishap: “I was so enraged that had I not been encumbered with baggage I believe I should have ventured to swim it.” He might have had George Colbert in mind. Mary at the site of Colbert's Ferry on the Tennessee RiverĪ wise hiring manager once told me that he tried to watch out for people who make you pay an emotional toll to work with them.

The Natchez Trace by James A. Crutchfield