The Santa Fe Trail, Mountain Branch

You are near the Mountain Branch of the Santa Fe Trail, the great trade road that linked Missouri to Santa Fe between eighteen twenty-one and eighteen eighty.

While the main route cut across the dry Cimarron desert, the safer Mountain Branch swung north and west through what is now southeastern Colorado, passing the trading post of Bent's Old Fort before climbing toward Raton Pass and crossing into New Mexico. Wagons rolled through here loaded with cloth, tools, and silver.

The trail crossed the Colorado high plains, threading the towns that became La Junta, Las Animas, Lamar, and Trinidad. When the railroad reached Santa Fe in eighteen eighty, the wagons fell silent. The ruts they cut are still visible across these grasslands, a faint signature of decades of commerce.