CHAPTER XXXVI

THE TRAIL TO SANTA FÉ

In the five years of depression that followed the panic of 1837 the United States abandoned the policy of the Indian frontier, without quite knowing why or how. Until the actual crash the various agencies of government, supported by public opinion, continued to administer the established system. After the recovery from the depression, it was taken for granted that the system was obsolete, although there was no formal act that abandoned it. By 1843, when there were at one moment over one thousand actual homeseekers starting across the Indian Country for residence in Oregon, it was obvious that there was something wrong with the idea that the Indian frontier could be perpetual. Earliest among the specific forces that were destined to break it down was a growing interest in traffic with New Mexico that took on the form and name of the Santa Fé trade.1

The northern provinces of Spain in America were developed at the terminals of radiating roads that joined on the Mexican plateau in the State of Durango. They were not established as the result of a persistent occupation of the country, but represented a conscious adaptation for the purpose of national defense. Texas, New Mexico, and Upper California, each at the end of its -long overland trail, took on modern shape about the time of the American Revolution. They were the attempt of Spain to defend herself to the north against the border competition of France, England, and Russia.

The civilization of these provinces was old but lacked the element of progress. The few Spaniards who lived in them had no ideal of making permanent homes but were disappointed if they failed to find wealth that could be appropriated and carried off. There was no general emigration from Spain to the colonies. What trade there was, was limited to monopolistic trading companies, and the dangerous conditions of the Spanish Main in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries gave much justification to the Spanish policy of limiting the traders to a few ports of entry which

1 Katherine Coman, Economic Beginnings of the Far West. How we won the Land beyond the Mississippi (1912).

they might reach only under official convoy. The oceans swarmed with pirates, privateers, and the public war vessels of enemies of Spain. Vera Cruz was maintained as the port for Mexico and the northern provinces, and the economic development of New Spain was limited to the traffic that could be carried on through that port.

The Spanish exploiters took naturally to the high country of Mexico, avoiding the plains along the coast. They were in search of precious metals and thought to find these only in the mountains. They soon learned of the endemic diseases that made the tropic flats perilous places for them to dwell. From Vera Cruz they pushed inland directly to the City of Mexico, and then spread south and north along the backbone of the continent. Their great road from Mexico ran north through Querétaro, Zacatecas, and Durango. Here it developed the eastern branch to Eagle Pass, San Antonio, and Nacogdoches, at whose northern extremity Texas appeared. It developed a western branch through Sonora to the Santa Cruz Valley and the Gila. The main line continued a little west of north to the Chihuahua Desert, across this to El Paso del Norte and thence up the valley of the Rio Grande del Norte. The northern terminus of the central road became New Mexico, with a capital at Santa Fé, about the time the English were making their first foothold upon the Atlantic seaboard.

At the beginning of the nineteenth century, New Mexico was separated from the American border by a thousand miles of plains and mountains. Even if it had not been the policy of Spain to prevent foreign intercourse with its colonies, the distance and difficulty of access would have protected Santa Fé and its related towns from American approach. There was no American understanding of the nature of the Spanish colonial civilization until in 1807 the Spanish outposts arrested Zebulon M. Pike and his escort and conducted them as prisoners through the forbidden regions. Pike's book gave the first picture of the slow-moving society, with its antiquity, its adobe houses, and its great herds, that called itself New Mexico.

Pike saw a market in New Mexico, if only it could be reached. The colonists, Spanish and Indian, had means, but nothing to buy. They dwelt more than fifteen hundred miles away from Vera Cruz with the connecting highway often impassable except for mule trains. There were few commodities that could stand the freight charge of delivery in Santa Fé. There were few local manufac

ordinary Yankee "notions," that every storekeeper in the States working out their own economic future with local resources. The tures and few artisans of any sort. The Spanish had no idea of

market was unsatisfied without even knowing what it lacked. silks and silver plate and other costly goods of little bulk, but the rors, needles, and thread were needed and lacking. There were carried at all times, were scarce and costly. Spoons, cutlery, mir

Pike described the New Mexico market in his book. Just as he printed it, the so-called Hidalgo revolt took place in Mexico, and there was a pretense of erecting a republic independent of Spain. A group of American traders, led by one McKnight, equipped a pack train in 1811 and set out across the plains from St. Louis, intent upon testing the truth of the stories of a free market at Santa Fé. They found the market, but it was not free. The Hidalgo revolt was suppressed, the Spanish authorities at Santa Fé were vigilant, and the adventurers paid for their temerity by jail sentences. It was still too soon to build up a traffic across the plains. And in 1819, when Spain and the United States established the Louisiana boundary, it appeared as though there might never be an occasion for it. The trade with Santa Fé had aroused a mild amount of cupidity, but not more than the fur trade with the Indians was sustaining all the time.

The Spanish barriers broke down in 1821. Even before Spain was displaced by independent Mexico in that year, the Spanish had dallied with the idea of encouraging American immigration into Texas, although without appreciating its possible consequences. When the news of the Mexican revolution reached the Missouri border in 1821, William Becknell hurriedly gathered a stock of goods and took the packs across the plains. He left Missouri in the late autumn, so late that his friends believed he could not get through. But in the early spring of 1822 he returned, heavy with profits, keen to repeat the trip, giving the word that the trade was open. That spring he took three wagons through to Santa Fé, revealing thereby the fact that the so-called American Desert could be casily traversed.2

The Santa Fé traders were an annual occurrence after 1822. In the early spring of each year they assembled their goods on the border, at St. Louis, or Franklin, or Independence. As the Missouri settlements ascended the river, the "jumping-off" place moved with them, reaching the mouth of the Kansas River at the western boundary of the State in 1831. At Independence, or its predecessors, the horse traders assembled with horses and mules for sale; the blacksmiths and wheelwrights opened their shops to repair and build the wagons. The harness-makers freshened up

The Missouri Historical Review has naturally specialized somewhat in Santa Fé matters; it printed in 1910, "The Journal of Captain William Becknell, 1821." Elliott Coues assembled much bibliographical and topographical learning in his notes to The Journal of Jacob Fowler, 1821-22 (1898).

their stock of saddlery. In April the stocks of goods arrived on river steamers from Pittsburgh or New Orleans, and in May the traders of the year got under way. They traveled as one great caravan, with a loose organization for protection against the Indians, until they reached the vicinity of Taos or Las Vegas, the outskirts of the Santa Fé country. Then their coöperation ceased, and a race began, each for himself, to grab the market.

The protection of the Santa Fé trade, whose inconsistency with Monroe's Indian policy few saw, was an object of immediate concern. Senator Thomas Hart Benton was the incarnation of border opinion from the moment he took his seat in 1821, and appreciated what Roosevelt has called "the glamour of mystery" that partly shrouded from sight "Mexico, with its gold and silver mines, its strange physical features, its population utterly foreign to us in race, religion, speech, and ways of life." Under his patronage the border traders received protection. Congress authorized in 1825 the survey and marking of a road towards Santa Fé to project as far as the international boundary on the Arkansas River near the one hundredth meridian. Enthusiasts talked of making this into a real road and connecting it eastward through the capitals of the northwestern States to a junction with the Cumberland Road at Wheeling. The National Road, west of Wheeling, was indeed begun in 1825, but the full western ideal was never realized.

The Santa Fé road commissioners were in conference with the Indians west of Missouri in 1825, at the same time that the Kaw and Osage commissioners were negotiating the basic treaties of the new Indian policy. The line of the Santa Fé Trail ran between the reserves retained by those two tribes, in almost a direct line from the bend of the Missouri at Independence to the great northern bend of the Arkansas. The Indians along the route promised not to molest the traders, but the latter relied more upon their own vigilance and fighting ability than upon this pledge. They moved as an armed caravan, and at night drew their wagons together, making an enclosed corral, with the wagon bodies providing a stout defense. Their live stock could be protected inside this corral if there seemed to be danger, and experience taught them that Indians would think twice before charging a body of well-armed white men under cover. More than this the traders asked for military protection, and their demand coincided with the need of the frontier policy for a new station in the vicinity of the Indian Country.