A run-in with Swaney

Posted on by Josh Foreman

Ryan and I met Dorsey Carson at the Mississippi Book Festival recently. Dorsey is an attorney in Jackson who has also acted in a good number of movies. We were chatting about Death Along the Natchez Trace, and Dorsey said he had acted in a movie about the Natchez Trace, the Wilderness Road, by Travis Mills.

Dorsey said he had played a character named John Swaney, a real historical figure who carried mail between Natchez and Nashville around the year 1800. I said, “Hot dang, we wrote the story of John Swaney in this book.” Swaney is the reason we know details about Samuel Mason’s banditry along the Trace — Swaney knew the man, and sometimes found his victims, robbed of all their possessions.

We had to get a picture with Dorsey. It was such a funny coincidence. So here’s to John Swaney, a tough man who lived a tough life and did his job well over 200 years ago.

Published by Josh Foreman

Josh Foreman grew up in the Jackson, Miss., area. He is an eleventh-generation Southerner and a sixth-generation Mississippian. From 2005-2014 he lived abroad, traveled, wrote and taught. He holds degrees from Mississippi State University and the University of New Hampshire. In the fall of 2019 he will join the Communication Department at Mississippi State as an instructor. He and Ryan Starrett are the authors of Hidden History of Jackson (2018), Hidden History of the Mississippi Sound (2019), and Hidden History of New Orleans (2020).