The Santa Fe Trail, Commerce Across the Plains

In November of eighteen twenty-one, a Missouri trader named William Becknell rode into Santa Fe with a pack of trade goods and discovered that Mexico had just won its independence from Spain. The Spanish had kept the border closed to American merchants; the new Mexican government was happy to do business. Becknell turned around, went home, and came back with wagons.

He is remembered as the Father of the Santa Fe Trail. The trail Becknell established ran roughly nine hundred miles from Franklin, Missouri, southwest across the Kansas plains to Santa Fe. It carried manufactured goods east to west, cotton cloth, hardware, tools, shoes, and returned with Mexican silver, mules, and furs.

It was one of the great commercial highways of the nineteenth century, and it generated fortunes for merchants in Missouri, New Mexico, and Chihuahua alike. Travelers had two route choices. The Mountain Route swung north through Bent's Fort in present-day Colorado before crossing Raton Pass into New Mexico.

The Cimarron Cutoff took a more direct line across the Oklahoma Panhandle, saving a hundred miles but crossing sixty miles of waterless grassland where wagon trains sometimes lost their livestock and their way. Both routes converged near Watrous and Fort Union in northeastern New Mexico before descending toward Santa Fe. The trail ran for fifty-nine years.

The Mexican-American War turned it military in eighteen forty-six when General Stephen Kearny marched the Army of the West down its length to take Santa Fe without firing a shot. After the war it carried American settlers and supplies into the newly acquired territory. It ended in eighteen eighty, the year the Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe Railway reached Santa Fe itself, the iron road following the same passes and river valleys the wagon tracks had worn for decades.

The ruts of the Santa Fe Trail are still visible from the air in certain stretches of Kansas and northeastern New Mexico, grass growing differently where thousands of wheels once pressed the earth.