The Natchez Trace was the first highway opened through the lower South, by the Treaty of Dancing Rabbit Creek in 1830 between the American government and the Choctaw Indians, after which the surrounding country became part of the state of Mississippi. At French Camp, Andrew Jackson’s Tennessee and Kentucky commands rested on their way to join him in his Coast Campaign in the War of 1812, a second struggle for American independence in which Mississippi took a heroic part.