The Way to the West, and the Lives of Three Early Americans: Boone—Crockett—Carson

by Emerson Hough

A RETREAT TO THE BLOCKHOUSE.

The Wagon Mound was a point of note, situated about six hundred and sixty-two miles west of the starting point. One might depart thence for Bent’s Fort on the Arkansas, located in a country very profitable for traders to keep in view; for above Bent’s famous hostelry on the mountain branch of the trail lay the yet wilder pack-horse commerce of the mountain trappers’ rendezvous, far more romantic and profitable, if less safe and steady than the wagon commerce of the prairies. From the Wagon Mound to the first settlements of the Mexicans, on the Rio Gallinas, was an easy stage, and to Santa Fé by this time all roads of the mountains thereabout pointed. It was seven hundred and eighty miles to Santa Fé, according to Gregg, the more modern chronicles making it seven hundred and seventy-five miles, the latter figures being for a part of the time above, and part of the time under the old Gregg estimates, which are singularly correct in view of Gregg’s facilities. The present Santa Fé railway follows the upper or mountain leg of the old trail, which went on up the Arkansas to Bent’s Fort, and did not take the leap into the desert. From the Wagon Mound on into Santa Fé the railway route is practically identical with the old wagon way.

Thus we may see that this great highway, broken midway and deflected to the southward, was less than one thousand miles in length. There was no connection, except a rude sort of pack route by way of Taos and the Colorado River country, between the end of the Santa Fé trail and the California country. The wagons did not go that way. The later railway drops down along the Rio Grande valley, just as did the Chihuahua wagon road; and bends westward far below the old trails of Walker and Jedediah Smith, who started on their transcontinental voyagings from points higher up in the mountains than Santa Fé or Taos.

The way from Santa Fé to California seems to have been well known, but the trade did not dare to attempt a commerce so distant, and so unprofitable as it must have been, consumed by such necessarily heavy transportation charges. We speak of the Santa Fé trail as one of the great Western highways, but it was a halting and broken and arrested highway. It was not yet quite time for the straight leap across the rivers. The trail clung to the rivers as far as it might, and the attempts to cut loose from the streams, and go straight across from the Red River to Chihuahua, proved to be unprofitable or impracticable.

The total amount of merchandise carried in these picturesque caravans of the prairies was perhaps not so great as we should imagine, though we must remember that a dollar was larger then than it is to-day. The extent of the trade varied from year to year, and did not regularly increase; for though we note one caravan in 1831 taking out two hundred thousand dollars’ worth of goods, we find that in 1841, ten years later, the whole annual trade was but one hundred and fifty thousand dollars. The climax was in 1843, when goods to the value of four hundred and fifty thousand dollars were transported.

The pay for this came back partly in specie, partly in furs, sometimes largely in horses and mules, the trade thus bearing a double profit and a double risk. The Indians did not care for gold or silver so much as they did for horses and mules, and diligent enough were their efforts to stampede the live stock of the traders. Upon occasion the United States Army was asked to escort a caravan, but this aid was not generally to be expected, especially since the worst part of the route, that infested by the Comanches, lay west of the then accepted western border of the United States. The average value of the trade was about one hundred and fifty thousand dollars yearly, and the total sum for the duration of this strange branch of American commerce was only about three million dollars.

The goods carried were at first largely prints and drillings, for the Mexicans got such goods from Vera Cruz on the coast, and only at great expense. Later silks, velvets, hardware and the general line of American goods began its first westward way across the American borders. Sometimes the stocks were retailed, sometimes sold at wholesale, the latter more often when the trader was in a hurry. It was a wild, peculiar and fascinating sort of commerce, and strong was the hold it naturally took upon the people of the Western border.

This trade was carried on mostly by our Southern-Western men, our new-Americans, as we may see by the letter of the grandson of James Baird, written from Kentucky. Glenn came from Cincinnati, Fowler from Covington, Kentucky, most of the other familiar figures from St. Louis, Franklin and other Missouri points. Morrison, the merchant of Kaskaskia, was a man who came down-stream. The Northern man, the man of New England or New York, had not yet become very much of a Westerner. The West was not yet safe enough for him. Nor indeed was he to lead the vanguard of the men who, far to the north of the old Santa Fé trail, were building another, a greater and more significant trail, one whose end we do not see even to-day; the men that were tapping all the secrets of the upper Rockies, that were to lead us to the brink of the Western sea and even to point beyond that sea. But for politics, the Southerners of to-day, the sons of the old daring ones, would admit the virtue of that finger pointing over seas.

There is still in New England something of the old timidity, the old unwillingness to see the pointing finger, the same un-American tardiness to recognize the challenge of the West. Had it not been for the fascinations of this upper country, for the allurements of the great trail that was to run across the continent to the far Northwest, there had been more competition in the Southwest trade, and mayhap a swifter crowding of events toward that state of affairs that Parkman saw when he visited the Santa Fé trail on his way home from the Rockies in 1846—the volunteers of Missouri, kindred to the men of Doniphan, who were straggling on out toward Mexico on an errand of justice that had long been overdue. Shuffling, angular, awkward, uncouth we may, with Parkman, admit these Southern-Western men to have been; each man his own commander, reluctant to admit a superior officer, as had been the fathers of these men from the time they left the Atlantic coast; but they did the work in Mexico. They opened the trail forever, and saw to it that the borders stretched and spread and gave us room. It is of no use to talk politics in questions like these, nor is there need to speak of the moralities. It is for the most part a matter of transportation. It was the Arkansas River trail that conquered Mexico.