The Natchez Trace is a corridor people have traveled for more than 10,000 years, across the homelands of the Natchez, Chickasaw and Choctaw nations. The Choctaw town of Chisha Foka, "among the post oaks," stood where Jackson is today. The 1830 Treaty of Dancing Rabbit Creek forced the Choctaw to give up all their land east of the Mississippi, and the removal that followed killed an estimated 2,500 people from starvation and exposure. Some may have walked the Old Trace on their way west, and the Trail of Tears crosses the parkway at four places.
Near Ridgeland the parkway packs in short stops. The Parkway Information Cabin at milepost 102.4 was built in 1951 as the parkway's first visitor center and has exhibits on the Old Trace and the Choctaw. At milepost 104.5 you can walk a short segment of the Old Trace itself, its dirt surface sloped for wagons, and the Bill Waller Craft Center beside it sells work by hundreds of Mississippi artisans, including Choctaw baskets. The Reservoir Overlook at milepost 105.6 faces the 33,000-acre Ross Barnett Reservoir, a Pearl River impoundment that supplies Jackson, and begins the paved Chisha Foka Trail.
At milepost 106.9 the Boyd Site holds mounds that began as two, built separately by people continuing a fading tradition, and were later covered by a third. The Park Service calls the site sacred to the Choctaw and other tribal nations, so treat it as a place of respect. The parkway runs 444 miles from Nashville to Natchez.
The closest stops worth working into your route