[CHAPTER XI]
THE SANTA FÉ TRAIL
On the fifth day after my arrival in Kansas City all was in readiness for my departure. There was another big bill to meet for Lizzie's overhaul, but I had the satisfaction of knowing that the bearings had all been replaced, as well as a few cylinders and pistons and things, and that there was just a chance of getting to the coast before something else went wrong. Once again I wrote polite letters to the factory at Chicago, paid many dozen "green backs" over the counter, and started off once more, this time with only thirty-five dollars in pocket. Once again fate and the post office had been unkind. Not a suggestion of anything was there at either of the post offices at any of my calls thereon. Amid vague wonderings and oft repeated doubts I promised myself a big cheque at Santa Fé, next stop. I was just beginning to know the ins and outs of the postal service.
The Santa Fé Trail is the oldest and most interesting highway in America. Rather should it be said that the pioneers over what later became known as the Santa Fé Trail were the first to leave permanent marks on routes that have since become "highways" between the Central-Western and the Far-Western States. In the days of the ox team and prairie-schooner, the plains and mountains were crossed by trails, usually along the lines of least resistance, keeping as close as possible to bases of supplies and water. Travel over the Santa Fé Trail began about 1822, starting from Little Rock, Arkansas (pronounced Arkansaw), and following the Arkansas River west. A few years later, this trail was superseded by a more permanent one going west from Kansas City (then called Westport) to "Great Bend," a base situated, as its name implies, on a great bend of the Arkansas River, and thence to Santa Fé by a choice of two routes. An important trade with the Spanish population of the south-west was early developed, reaching its zenith in the '60s. This route, the one which I followed, has now been marked a considerable part of the way by stone monuments erected by the "Daughters of the American Revolution" and constituted the chief inroad from the East to the Far West. Santa Fé itself, next to St. Augustine, Florida, is the most ancient city in America, having been founded in 1605 by Spanish settlers on the site of a "pueblo" or Indian village of far-distant origin. Naturally, therefore, it was the centre of trade for years numbered by hundreds, and traders from afar brought their goods and supplies in boats up the rivers as far as navigable and then in teams across the dreary plains and over the steep Rockies to this one destination.
Later, in the gold-rush to California in 1849, emigrants reached San Francisco, the "Golden Gate," via this same Santa Fé Trail, undergoing indescribable hardships on the way, and at all times subjected to frequent onslaughts by the hostile Indians.
The first railroads were built across the plains alongside the old trails. The first automobile trips (and I take off my hat to them!) naturally followed the railroads, from the necessity of keeping near to supplies. But the motor-car of to-day frequently makes either short cuts or detours—leading perhaps 100 or 200 miles away from the railroad—in order to visit sections offering unusual attractions, or places of historical interest, even when located in desert regions.
Thus, with Kansas City behind me, the journey begins to be really interesting from an historic, if not from a scenic point of view. The hand of modern civilization at last is seen to relax its grasp. Now, instead of the prosaic, the conventional and the luxurious, are we to find the unique, the heterodox and the primitive. After the tainted breath of huge cities and the seething, crushing, maddening turmoil of wealth and modernism are to follow the pure unbounded atmosphere of the giant plains, the mystic call of the great mountains, the vastness, the fearfulness and the rapture of the scorching deserts. Which shall it be for me?
Before me lie 500 miles of perfectly flat and uninteresting country before I leave the State of Kansas and enter Colorado. Then follow another 200 equally flat, equally drear, to be crossed before the Rockies loom into sight. Seven hundred miles of endless weary prairie, stretching always, everywhere, as far as the eye can see, with never a hill nor a dale nor hardly a tree in sight!—Nothing but boundless, illimitable corn, wheat and prairie.
That night, after an afternoon's run of 120 miles, I rested in a cornfield. The road had ended abruptly. An old bridge had been demolished and a new one was about to be erected. A heap of debris in the middle attracted my attention, and I was fortunate. Here the road ended; there was a little chasm some thirty feet across; beyond was the road again. Nothing for it but to turn back. Turning back is always objectionable. I deemed that it would be less so in the morning. That is why I wrapped myself in my mosquito net behind a hedge in a cornfield and offered up thanksgiving.