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John Swaney's wilderness ride from Nashville to Natchez
 Few men in the young United States in 1800 held a job more dangerous, more daring or more talked about than 19-year-old John Lee Swaney. He was a post rider and delivered mail between Nashville and Natchez.
Swaney was one of several men employed by Colonel Benjamin J. Joselyn of Nashville, who acquired the first government contract to deliver mail between these two frontier towns. The route was estimated at about 500 miles and it took Swaney, on his best days, about a week to make the one-way ride through the vast wilderness. He sometimes faced hostile Indians but worst of all, dangerous outlaws.
The mail delivery to and from Natchez was first considered by Winthrop Sargent, the first territorial governor of Mississippi who arrived in Natchez in August 1798. Natchez was the most western U.S. frontier post at this time. After being named by Congress as the governor, one of Sargent's first dispatches concerning his new duties was to Secretary of State Timothy Pickering in Philadelphia, where the nation's capital was located at the time.
In that letter, Sargent said it was crucial that he be able to convey government business in a somewhat timely manner since Natchez was so isolated from the rest of the United States, separated by hundreds of miles of wilderness and Indians, and only a rifle shot away from a foreign power. Just across the river stood the Spanish outpost called the Post of Concord at present day Vidalia, commanded by Capt. Jose Vidal.
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