Of these two great land trails west of the Missouri, one, broken midway, does not deserve actually the name of transcontinental trail. This was the old Santa Fé trail, which could be called continuous only as far as the Spanish province of New Mexico. Commerce got westward even so far as California in some fashion, now and again, from Taos and the old city of Santa Fé, but Spanish trails and the old trapping roads west of New Mexico were commonly concerned with the pack-train and not the wagon.
The other overland trail, and the greatest of all American roads, if we measure length and importance as well, was the ancient Oregon trail up the Platte, over the South Pass and down the Columbia; a trail forgotten by most of the young men of to-day, and existing no more to terrify the young women whom young men marry, as they did in the times of our fathers, when moving West meant tearing out the heart.
As to the theory of straight lines, Lieutenant Pike tells us that the first men to reach Santa Fé did not go straight westward, but also wandered up the aboriginal highway of the Platte valley, over what was later to be the course of the Oregon trail, turning to the southward when far up the stream, and following the South Fork of the Platte down into the Rockies, which would bring the traveler within wilderness-touch of the Spanish settlements. La Lande, the perfidious trader, who so sadly left in the lurch his patron, the merchant Morrison of Kaskaskia, and took up his permanent abode in Santa Fé, is thought to have reached that city, in the year 1804, by this route; and it is known that James Purcell (or James Pursley, as Pike has the spelling) was directed to Santa Fé in the year 1805 by some Indians whom he met on the upper Platte.
This route by the Platte was not, however, either the permanent or the original one. Indeed, the first expedition between the Spanish and the American settlements came, strangely enough, from the west, and not from the east, and was undertaken by the Spaniards as early as 1720. Then, in 1739, the Mallet brothers, Frenchmen from the settlements along the Mississippi, started for New Mexico by the strange route of the upper Missouri River, getting far up into the big bend of the Missouri before they discovered that they were going quite the wrong way! Their belief that the Spanish settlements could be reached by way of the head streams of the Missouri is strange confirmation of our doctrine that early traveling man ever clung to the waterways. The river—it would lead anywhere! The Mallet party returned in 1740, some of them by way of the Arkansas River, which presently brought them out at New Orleans!
We may therefore discover that neither the Missouri nor the Platte could have been called the accepted highway into the lower West at the time Lieutenant Pike set out to find the headwaters of the Red River. There is a shrewd doubt as to Pike’s innocence in getting over on the head of the Rio Grande instead of the Red River. It was at least a lucky mistake; and his captivity among the Spaniards was productive of very good results to the United States later on, one of its most important results being his suggesting the route along the Arkansas, instead of the Platte, for the west-bound travelers. It was strong-legged, stout-hearted Zebulon who told of the profits of the possible Spanish trade, and credit is usually given him for first outlining the historic trail along the Arkansas.
It grew shorter and shorter, this wagon trail to the West, as the traders came to know the country. The government surveyed a fine way for the caravans, which took them around the dangerous Cimarron desert, and clung to the waters a trifle longer; yet the travelers would have none of it, but built their trail so direct from Independence to Santa Fé that not even those air-line lovers, the railway engineers, could so very much improve it when they came to make their iron trail between those two points.
One finds something uncanny when he reflects upon the discoveries of these Western regions. The ancient ways seem to have lain ready and waiting, the lines of travel simply falling into the foreordained plan, so that there remains no extraordinary credit to any venturer, no matter how early. For instance, we know that our hardy young soldiers, Lewis and Clark, to whom we habitually ascribe the credit of being the first white men up the great waterway of the Missouri, were preceded by half a century by the Frenchman, Sieur de la Verendrye, who took his two sons and started west by way of the Great Lakes in 1742, jumped from the Red River of the North to the Mandan villages on the Missouri, and explored the region along the Missouri, the Yellowstone and the Bighorn rivers, just one hundred years before Frémont “discovered” the Rockies!
De la Verendrye is thought to have been the first man of the North to see the Rockies; yet back of him we have Nicollet and Champlain, and all those hardy ancients who sought cheerfully and hopefully for the China Sea by way of the Green Bay portage, and the Wisconsin and Minnesota rivers, in search of the fabled “Asian Strait,” which later was practically materialized in the interlocking Western rivers of America.
As to Pike’s journey across the plains, we must know that the Spaniards had sent out an expedition, under Malgares, to meet him or anticipate him. The Spanish leader who thus ventured boldly so far to the east to head off this dreaded invasion of the Northern whites, and to set the Indians against them, must have traveled somewhat along this same pre-ordained trail of the Arkansas. Not all Spain could keep the feet of the young Anglo-Saxons out of that trail. There were always the adventurers; and there were always the trails there, ready, waiting, expectant, prepared for them. There is no reading so thrilling as the bare truth about our West; and the most thrilling part of it is the awesome feeling that our venturers were after all themselves but puppets in a grim and awful game. There lay the Missouri, the Platte, the Arkansas; and stretching out to meet them reached the Columbia and the Colorado. It was appointed, it was foregone!
Among those to go out early into the unknown Southwest, after Lieutenant Pike had told us some few things regarding the pueblos of old Spain among the mountains of the Rockies, were the fur trader Phillibert, and the traders Chouteau and De Munn, of St. Louis, who bought out Phillibert’s goods and men in the Rockies. Phillibert had planned a rendezvous on Huerfano Creek. This was in 1815, the year following that in which Phillibert had made his first trip into that Western region.