The Natchez Trace and the Harpe brothers

The old Trace ran five hundred miles from Natchez to Nashville, and boatmen walked it home with a season’s pay in their pockets. That made it the most robbed road in early America. Micajah and Wiley Harpe, working it in the 1790s, are often called the country’s first serial killers. The Trace is a quiet parkway today; it was not.