Santa Fe Trail

Santa Fe Trail. The Santa Fe Trail stretched nine hundred miles from what is now central Missouri through Kansas, Oklahoma, and Colorado to Santa Fe, New Mexico. Native Americans first used sections of this route for trade, especially between peoples of the Great Plains and the Pueblo Indians of the Southwest. Spanish conquistadores followed it as they explored the interior of North America. French and American fur trappers knew it as a route to the Rocky Mountains.

In 1821 the Missourian William Becknell took a variety of frontier trade goods along the trail, thereby opening a commercial link to New Mexico, then part of the Republic of Mexico. This trade flourished, soon engaging thousands of men, wagons, and draft animals and drawing capital investment from both U.S. and Mexican citizens. In 1846 the U.S. Army of the West marched down the trail when it invaded and occupied the Southwest, subsequently annexed by the United States in the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, which ended the Mexican War. For the next thirty years freighting on the trail, particularly to supply southwestern army posts, reached as much as a million dollars a year.

The westward progress of various railroads shortened the trail in the 1860s. Its day ended in 1880 with the completion of the Atchison, Topeka, and Santa Fe railroad into New Mexico. Not an avenue of pioneer settlement, the Santa Fe Trail was a route to commerce and conquest and has been thus enshrined in the mythology of the American West.

Bibliography

Josiah Gregg , Commerce of the Prairies, 1844.
Max L. Moorhead , New Mexico's Royal Road: Trade and Travel on the Chihuahua Trail, 1958.

Michael L. Olsen