Santa Fe Trail: Mountain Branch

This marker traces the Mountain Branch of the Santa Fe Trail, the wagon road that ran through what is now Trinidad and climbed toward Raton Pass on the New Mexico line. In the early decades of the trail, Bent, Saint Vrain and Company wagons are said to have used this mountain route, a longer but safer alternative to the dry Cimarron Cutoff. For half a century it carried trade between Missouri and Santa Fe.

The pass itself was a brutal, axle-breaking climb near eight thousand feet, hard going for heavy wagons until it was improved in later years. In eighteen forty-six, Stephen Kearny's Army of the West marched over it on the way to seize New Mexico. During the Civil War, Colorado volunteers crossed the same pass to reinforce Union troops and win the Battle of Glorieta Pass, the fight that turned back a Confederate push into the Southwest.