This, during fifty years, was the principal use made of the Missouri River portion of the Louisiana Territory, in the northwest. And in the southwest portion little more was done, but the American merchants were the ones who opened that.
Young Lieutenant Zebulon Montgomery Pike first explored it, sent out by the commander-in-chief of the army, in 1806, while Lewis and Clark were still homeward bound from the other direction. He traveled up the Arkansas River and into the Rocky Mountains of Colorado, and landed as a prisoner in Santa Fe of New Mexico.
The news that he brought back, of New Mexico and the way to get there (an easier way than his own round-about tour) encouraged the merchants and capitalists of St. Louis to hope that a trading route, back and forth, might be opened with Mexico. Calico, cotton, shoes, tobacco, trinkets and the like were to be sold for gold and silver, or exchanged for buffalo-robes, beaver-furs, blankets, and wool—all at one hundred per cent, profit over the original cost. Mexico manufactured very little, and was eager for American goods.
As the result, through the country of the Kiowas and the Comanches there was opened the great Santa Fe Trail of the merchants and traders. From the Missouri River at the Kansas border it struck out into present central Kansas, headed southwest to the Arkansas River, and passing on across the desert into northeastern New Mexico arrived at old Santa Fe, seven hundred and seventy miles.
The other great national trail, the Oregon Trail of the fur-hunters, was long a pack trail, until the wagons of the emigrants and gold-seekers to California began to throng it. The Santa Fe Trail soon became mainly a wagon trail, for the Santa Fe caravans.
From the Missouri River the traders set out, twenty, thirty, forty wagons in a train—huge canvas-covered Conestogas, thirty feet in length with boxes six feet in depth, carrying three tons of freight and drawn by eight span of oxen or mules. From the lead span's noses to the end-gate of the wagon the length over all was thirty yards. These Santa Fe wagons were not prairie schooners; they were prairie frigates.
Thus they lumbered on, at not better than fifteen miles a day; and during their fifty or sixty days' trips out, loaded, and their forty days' trips back, partly empty, the Kiowas and Comanches, the storms and the hot dry desert, saw to it that they did not have easy sailing.
Among the early Santa Fe traders were the Bent brothers, Charles, William and George, of a large and well-known American family. Their grandfather Silas Bent had been captain of the Boston patriots who in 1773 dumped overboard the English tea on which the Colonists refused to pay a tax; their father Silas Bent, Jr., was first judge of Common Pleas in St. Louis; their younger brother Silas III became a naval officer and discovered and charted the warm-water flow or Japanese Current of the Pacific Ocean; and they themselves aided civilization by building the massive Bent's Fort of the Plains, on the Arkansas River in south-eastern Colorado—for many years the only trading-post and supply depot that could be depended upon, in all the Southwest.
There had been a few traders killed, almost every year, by the Indians; but in 1828 matters grew so bad that the St. Louis merchants asked help from the Government. This year 1828 not only were several traders killed; a party of Comanches who knew nothing of the killings were invited into camp and were shot, except one, out of revenge. The one escaped, to tell his friends. Of course, after this nothing but war could be expected from the southwest Indians, who would be only too glad of an excuse to capture the white man's goods and teams.
William Bent, and perhaps George, already were looking up a site for the fort. They had been attacked, and almost wiped out in a fierce battle. Charles Bent, who was older than they, had made the round trip to Santa Fe. In the spring of 1829 he started again.