The Santa Fe Trail: America's Commercial Highway

In September of eighteen twenty-one, a Missouri trader named William Becknell loaded a small pack string with goods and headed southwest into Mexican territory. He had no official permission, no diplomatic backing, and no certainty that the Mexican authorities in Santa Fe would receive him as a trader rather than arrest him as an intruder. Mexico had just won its independence from Spain that September, and the new government, unlike the Spanish colonial administration, was open to commerce. Becknell arrived in Santa Fe and sold everything he carried at a profit that, by some accounts, ran to several hundred percent. He was back in Missouri by January and loading again.

The route he blazed crossed nearly a thousand miles of open country. Caravans left Independence, Missouri, rolled southwest across the Kansas plains, forded the Arkansas River somewhere near present-day Dodge City or Larned, then continued into Mexican territory toward the Raton Pass or the Cimarron Cutoff. The Cimarron route was shorter but drier, crossing the most arid stretch of the Great Plains with limited water, exposed to Comanche and Kiowa raiders who did not recognize American or Mexican authority over their own territory.

For nearly sixty years, from Becknell's first crossing in eighteen twenty-one until the Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe Railway made it redundant in the early eighteen eighties, the Santa Fe Trail was the primary commercial artery between the United States and the Southwest. Military freight, manufactured goods, specie, and livestock moved west. Silver, gold, wool, and mules moved east. The wagon ruts cut so deeply into some stretches of Kansas grassland that they are still visible from the air today, grass-grown lines pressed into the earth by a commerce that ran for six decades across what the trail travelers called a sea of grass.

The trail also carried armies. Soldiers marched it during the Mexican-American War in eighteen forty-six. Stephen Kearny led his Army of the West down this route to capture New Mexico and California. The trail was never just a trade route. It was a line of national ambition pressed across someone else's country.