The first mergers, the first combinations of capital ever made in the commerce of America began here on the far-off prairies, when the traders of the Arkansas began to band up and pool their outfits for mutual protection. The strength of these great companies rendered the danger of attack by Indians very slight, and it is a fact that but few lives were ever lost on the Santa Fé trail, scarce a dozen in a dozen years. It was indeed irony of fate that splendid Jedediah Smith, the hero of such tremendous undertakings in the mountains of the Northwest, should meet his fate while hunting for a water hole in the hated desert of the Cimarron, afar down in the dry Southwest.[[34]]
By 1824 the Santa Fé trade was well organized. The route was proved feasible, and the business assured of profit, wherefore many went into it, and presently the old trail became a great road, later to be very prominent in the history of the West. The Spaniards did their best to keep on both sides of the fence in this matter. They wanted the goods of the Americans, but hated the Americans themselves. They tried to kill the trade with excessive frontier duties, yet allowed smuggling and bribery to any limit; and these latter two industries were accepted as part of the conditions of the trade. The greatest loss of life began to occur when the fighting Texans from below, actuated by a desire for revenge and pillage, began to push up and to harass the commerce which was proving so profitable to Mexico, in spite of Mexico’s vacillation.
These fighting Texans traveled far to the north of the trail, indeed, and followed the Mexicans into their villages, where they killed them in numbers. Texas, we must remember, was not yet a state, and little answer was made to the wail of the thrifty traders, who besought the United States government to give them protection against the Texans. The latter did some things not altogether pleasant to recount, but were for the most part serving nearly right the government of the United States, which could so long hesitate in accepting Houston’s gift of Texas, the “bride adorned for her espousal;” which, indeed, so long hesitated to believe that there was or could be a West really great. Small indeed were some of the “great” men of that time; and small are some of our great men to-day.
The common belief is that all the capital engaged in this trade toward the Southwest was American capital, and that the enterprises ran all one way. This was not the case, for by 1843 the Mexican capital embarked in the commerce to the Spanish colonies was about equal to that of the Americans. The trade grew steadily, even subject as it was to the caprice of Mexican governments, and of Texas privateers on the high seas of the prairies.
We learn that in 1831 a party of two hundred persons, with one hundred wagons and two hundred thousand dollars’ worth of goods, started for Santa Fé. This party was notable in that one of its members was Josiah Gregg, a level-headed, shrewd man, who was later to become famous as the historian of the Santa Fé trail. Nearly all the later histories of that highway and its peculiarities are based upon Gregg’s able work; which fact he himself points out with a certain plaintiveness in his later years (1846), stating that pillagers of his papers did not always stop to give him credit. Gregg was a big man, a thinker, a man whose sound sense would succeed in any time. One likens him to the good, sensible business man of to-day, the mainstay of our republic, the practical conductor of affairs.
One detail will serve to show how much in advance he was of his time. In 1846 we find the Easterner, Francis Parkman, and his friend Shaw, killing scores of the great bisons of the plains for no better purpose than the securing of the tail for a trophy. It makes one blush to read of such wasteful barbarity as this, which could kill tons and tons of such creatures and leave the meat to rot on the ground. Our sensitive Eastern writer Parkman, keen mind and able pen as were his, was a very savage in his lust for “sport;” indeed worse than any savage, for the latter never killed for sport alone. Gregg was neither a Parkman nor a modern “lover of nature,” but something much better, a man of forethought and of good sense. His protest at the waste of life and food in the wanton killing of buffalo is one of the most worthy things of his worthy book. He prophesied what Parkman could not see with all his florid pictures of the West that was to be—a West soon to be barren of the great game that did so much to win that West from savagery. The wicked wastefulness of the killing of the buffalo was one of the American national crimes. Stout Josiah Gregg saw it and deplored it, knowing as he did that much of the success of the Southwest trade ever depended upon the buffalo.
As to the distances and the direction of the ancient trail, we may consider it as starting at the old Western town of Independence, on the Missouri River, and extending properly no farther than the town of Santa Fé, in New Mexico. Many traders went on down into Old Mexico, as far as Chihuahua, which city so many of the first adventurers knew against their will. We have heard of Kit Carson, as a teamster, as far to the south as Chihuahua, and know that in 1828 he hired out there to Robert McKnight, one of the long-time prisoners in that city, later prominently identified with the history of the trail. Different Missouri towns outfitted parties for the trading to the Southwest, among these prominently St. Louis, and the less important point of Franklin. We may consider the Missouri River as our frontier at this epoch, and find most of our traders among those who lived near the border or were concerned in business ventures in that neighborhood. Assuredly this talk of the Santa Fé trade was the first Western bee in the Kit Carson bonnet, while he was yet a boy in Missouri.
The course of the old trail was astonishingly direct. It left little to be gained in distance saving, or in the essential qualities of grass and water, except along the cut-off over the Cimarron desert, which the travelers would not forego. The first section of the trail, that from Independence to Council Grove, the place where the wagon trains usually organized and went into semi-military formation, was over a pleasant, safe and easy country, a distance of one hundred and forty-three miles, according to Gregg.
Thence the next stage was to the Great Bend of the Arkansas, in the line of such modern towns as Galva, McPherson and Great Bend, although probably it touched the Arkansas at the top of the bend, near the village of Ellinwood, the first railway station east of Great Bend. This lies in a region now tamed into a wheat country and settled with contented farmers, raising crops that have, by the education of the years themselves, grown fit to endure that high, dry air, on the edge of the once rainless region. It was two hundred and seventy miles out to the Bend of the Arkansas, and two hundred and ninety-three miles to the noted Pawnee Rock, which to-day has a town named for it. Not crossing the Arkansas as yet, the trail kept down the western leg of the Great Bend, passed the islands known as the Caches, kept up-stream for a time to a point twenty miles west of the town now known as Dodge City—the same “Dodge” so famous in the cattle days—and reached then the ford of the Arkansas, which Gregg says was three hundred and eighty-seven miles west of Independence.[[35]]
This was about half way on the journey, and on the border line between the United States and the Spanish provinces. Gregg makes the jump from the safe Arkansas to the risky Cimarron a distance of fifty-eight miles, two or three days’ travel, and without water, as well as without landmarks. The erstwhile boom town of Ivanhoe, of which one remembers talk in county-seat wars as far back as 1886, a little town far down in the dry country, is near the line of the old trail. Reaching the Cimarron, the trail bent up that doubtful waterway to Cold Spring, five hundred and thirty-five miles from Independence. There it took another leap to the southwest, over a country then fairly well known from the Spanish end of the line, and over a well defined road, which could not be mistaken.