before the nineteenth century arrived.

Baily finally reached New Orleans. The city then contained about
a thousand houses and was not only the market for the produce of
the river plantations but also the center of an extensive Indian
trade. The goods for this trade were packed in little barrels
which were carried into the interior on pack-horses, three
barrels to a horse. The traders traveled for hundreds of miles
through the woods, bartering with the Indians on the way and
receiving, in exchange for their goods, bear and deer skins,
beaver furs, and wild ponies which had been caught by lariat in
the neighboring Apalousa country.

Baily had intended to return to New York by sea, but on his
arrival at New Orleans he was unable to find a ship sailing to
New York. He therefore decided to proceed northward by way of the
long and dangerous Natchez Trace and the Tennessee Path. Though
few Europeans had made this laborious journey before 1800, the
Natchez Trace had been for many years the land route of thousands
of returning rivermen who had descended the Mississippi in
flatboat and barge. In practically all cases these men carried
with them the proceeds of their investment, and, as on every
thoroughfare in the world traveled by those returning from
market, so here, too, highwaymen and desperadoes, red and white,
built their lairs and lay in wait. Some of the most revolting
crimes of the American frontier were committed on these northward
pathways and their branches.

Joining a party bound for Natchez, a hundred and fifty miles
distant overland, Baily proceeded to Lake Pontchartrain and