|
The
story of the
Santa Fe
Trail now passing into oblivion, once was on the tongue of every man.
This old highroad in its heyday presented the most romantic and appealing
features of the earlier frontier life. The
Santa Fe
Trail was the great path of commerce between our frontier and the
Spanish towns trading through
Santa Fe.
This commerce began in 1822, when about threescore men shipped certain
goods across the lower Plains by pack-animals. By 1826 it was employing a
hundred men and was using wagons and mules. In 1830, when oxen first were
used on the trail, the trade amounted to $120,000 annually; and by 1843,
when the Spanish ports were closed, it had reached the value of $450,000,
involving the use of 230 wagons and 350 men.
|
Wagon Train in 1847.
This image available for photographic prints
HERE!
|
|
It was Pike's story of the far Southwest that
first started the idea of the commerce of the
Santa Fe
Trail. In that day geography was a human thing, a thing of vital
importance to all men. Men did not read the stock markets; they read
stories of adventure, tales of men returned from lands out yonder in the
West .
Heretofore the swarthy Mexicans, folk of the
dry plains and hills around the head of the Rio Grande and the Red, had
carried their cotton goods and many other small and needful things all the
way from Vera Cruz on the seacoast, over trails that were long, tedious,
uncertain, and expensive. A far shorter and more natural trade route went
West
along the
Arkansas, which would bring the American goods to the doors of the
Spanish settlements. After Pike and one or two others had returned with
reports of the country, the possibilities of this trade were clear to any
one with the merchant's imagination.
There is rivalry for the title of "Father
of the
Santa Fe Trail." As early as 1812, when the United States was at war
with England, a party of men on horseback trading into the
West ,
commonly called the McKnight, Baird, and Chambers party, made their way
West
to Santa Fe.
There, however, they met with disaster. All their goods were confiscated
and they themselves lay in Mexican jails for nine years. Eventually the
returning survivors of this party told their stories, and those stories,
far from chilling, only inflamed the ardor of other adventurous traders.
In 1821 more than one American trader reached
Santa Fe;
and, now that the Spanish yoke had been thrown off by the Mexicans, the
goods, instead of being confiscated, were purchased eagerly.
It is to be remembered, of course,
that trading of this sort to Mexico was not altogether a new thing.
Sutlers of the old fur traders and trappers already had found the way to
New Spain from the valley of the Platte, south along the eastern edge of
the Rockies, through
Wyoming
and
Colorado.
By some such route as that at least one trader, a French Creole, agent of
the firm of Bryant & Morrison at Kaskaskia, had penetrated to the Spanish
lands as early as 1804, while
Lewis and Clark were still absent in the
upper wilderness. Each year the great mountain rendezvous of the trappers
-- now at Bent's Fort on the
Arkansas,
now at Horse Creek in
Wyoming ,
now on Green River in
Utah ,
or even farther beyond the mountains -- demanded supplies of food and
traps and ammunition to enable the hunters to continue their work for
another year. Perhaps many of the pack-trains which regularly supplied
this shifting mountain market already had traded in the Spanish country.
It is not necessary to go into further
details regarding this primitive commerce of the prairies. It yielded a
certain profit; it shaped the character of the men who carried it on. But
what is yet more important, it greatly influenced the country which lay
back of the border on the
Missouri
River. It called yet more men from the eastern settlements to those
portions which lay upon the edge of the Great Plains. There crowded yet
more thickly, up to the line between the certain and the uncertain, the
restless westbound population of all the country.
If on the south the valley of the
Arkansas
led outward to New Spain, yet other pathways made out from the Mississippi
River into the unknown lands. The
Missouri
was the first and last of our great natural frontier roads. Its lower
course swept along the eastern edge of the Plains, far to the south, down
to the very doors of the most adventurous settlements in the Mississippi
Valley. Those who dared its stained and turbulent current had to push up,
onward, northward, past the mouth of the Platte, far to the north across
degrees of latitude, steadily forward through a vast virgin land. Then the
river bent boldly and strongly off to the west, across another empire. Its
great falls indicated that it headed high; beyond the great falls its
steady sweep westward and at last southward, led into yet other kingdoms.
When we travel by horse or by modern motor car in that now accessible
region and look about us, we should not fail to reflect on the long trail
of the upbound boats which Manuel Lisa and other traders sent out almost
immediately upon the return of the
Lewis and Clark
Expedition. We should
see them struggling up against that tremendous current before steam was
known, driven by their lust for new lands. We may then understand fully
what we have read of the enterprises of the old American Fur Company, and
bring to mind the forgotten names of Campbell and Sublette, of
General
Ashley and of Wyeth -- names to be followed by others really of less
importance, as those of Bonneville and Fremont. That there could be farms,
that there ever might be homes, in this strange wild country, was, to
these early adventurers, unthinkable.
Continued Next Page
|
Please report
broken links, missing pictures, or other problems online by clicking
