The Last American Frontier

by Frederic L. Paxson

Yet the Santa Fé trade was national in its importance. Its romance contained a constant appeal to a public that was reading the Indian tales of James Fenimore Cooper, and that loved stories of hardship and adventure. New Mexico was a foreign country with quaint people and strange habitations. The American desert, not much more than a chartless sea, framed and emphasized the traffic. If one must have confirmation of the truth that frontier causes have produced results far beyond their normal measure, such confirmation may be found here.

The traders to Santa Fé commonly travelled together in a single caravan for safety. In the earlier years they started overland from some Missouri town—Franklin most often—to a rendezvous at Council Grove. The erection of Fort Leavenworth and an increasing navigation of the Missouri River made possible a starting-point further west than Franklin; hence when this town was washed into the Missouri in 1828 its place was taken by the new settlement of Independence, further up the river and only twelve miles from the Missouri border. Here at Independence was done most of the general outfitting in the thirties. For the greater part of the year the town was dead, but for a few weeks in the spring it throbbed with the rough-and-ready life of the frontier. Landing of traders and cargoes, bartering for mules and oxen, building and repairing wagons and ox-yokes, and in the evening drinking and gambling among the hard men soon to leave port for the Southwest,—all these gave to Independence its name and place. From Independence to Council Grove, some one hundred and fifty miles, across the border, the wagons went singly or in groups. At the Grove they halted, waiting for an escort, or to organize in a general company for self-defence. Here in ordinary years the assembled traders elected a captain whose responsibility was complete, and whose authority was as great as he could make it by his own force. Under him were lieutenants, and under the command of these the whole company was organized in guards and watches, for once beyond the Grove the company was in dangerous Indian Country in which eternal vigilance was the price of safety.

The unit of the caravan was the wagon,—the same Pittsburg or Conestoga wagon that moved frontiersmen whenever and wherever they had to travel on land. It was drawn by from eight to twelve mules or oxen, and carried from three to five thousand pounds of cargo. Over the wagon were large arches covered with Osnaburg sheetings to turn water and protect the contents. The careful freighter used two thicknesses of sheetings, while the canny one slipped in between them a pair of blankets, which might thus increase his comfort outward bound, and be in an inconspicuous place to elude the vigilance of the customs officials at Santa Fé. Arms, mounts, and general equipment were innumerable in variation, but the prairie schooner, as its white canopy soon named it, survived through its own superiority.

At Council Grove the desert trip began. The journey now became one across a treeless prairie, with water all too rare, and habitations entirely lacking. The first stage of the trail crossed the country, nearly west, to the great bend of the Arkansas River, two hundred and seventy miles from Independence. Up the Arkansas it ran on, past Chouteau's Island, to Bent's Fort, near La Junta, Colorado, where fur traders had established a post. Water was most scarce. Whether the caravan crossed the river at the Cimarron crossing or left it at Bent's Fort to follow up the Purgatoire, the pull was hard on trader and on stock. His oxen often reached Santa Fé with scarcely enough strength left to stand alone. But with reasonable success and skilful guidance the caravan might hope to surmount all these difficulties and at last enter Santa Fé, seven hundred and eighty miles away, in from six to seven weeks from Independence.

When the Mexican War came in 1846, the Missouri frontier was familiar with all of the long trail to Santa Fé. Even in the East there had come to be some real interest in and some accurate knowledge of the desert and its thoroughfares. One of the earliest steps in the strategy of the war was the organization of an Army of the West at Fort Leavenworth, with orders to march overland against Mexico and Upper California.

Colonel Stephen W. Kearny was given command of the invading army, which he recruited largely from the frontier and into which he incorporated a battalion of the Mormon emigrants who were, in the summer of 1846, near Council Bluffs, on their way to the Rocky Mountains and the country beyond. Kearny himself knew the frontier, duty having taken him in 1845 all the way to the mountains and back in the interest of policing the trails. By the end of June he was ready to begin the march towards Bent's Fort on the upper Arkansas, where there was to be a common rendezvous. To this point the army marched in separate columns, far enough apart to secure for all the force sufficient water and fodder from the plains. Up to Bent's Fort the march was little more than a pleasure jaunt. The trail was well known, and Indians, never likely to run heedlessly into danger, were well behaved. Beyond Bent's Fort the advance assumed more of a military aspect, for the enemy's country had been entered and resistance by the Mexicans was anticipated in the mountain passes north of Santa Fé. But the resistance came to naught, while the army, footsore and hot, marched easily into Santa Fé on August 18, 1846. In the palace of the governor the conquering officers were entertained as lavishly as the resources of the provinces would permit. "We were too thirsty to judge of its merits," wrote one of them of the native wines and brandy which circulated freely; "anything liquid and cool was palatable." With little more than the formality of taking possession New Mexico thus fell into the hands of the United States, while the war of conquest advanced further to the West. In the end of September Kearny started out from Santa Fé for California, where he arrived early in the following January.

The conquest of the Southwest extended the boundary of the United States to the Gila and the Pacific, broadening the area of the desert within the United States and raising new problems of long-distance government in connection with the populations of New Mexico and California. The Santa Fé trail, with its continuance west of the Rio Grande, became the attenuated bond between the East and the West. From the Missouri frontier to California the way was through the desert and the Indian Country, with regular settlements in only one region along the route. The reluctance of foreign customs officers to permit trade disappeared with the conquest, so that the traffic with the Southwest and California boomed during the fifties.

The volume of the traffic expanded to proportions which had never been dreamed of before the conquest. Kearny's baggage-trains started a new era in plains freighting. The armies had continuously to be supplied. Regular communication had to be maintained for the new Southwest. But the freighting was no longer the adventurous pioneering of the Santa Fé traders. It became a matter of business, running smoothly along familiar channels. It ceased to have to do with the extension of geographic knowledge and came to have significance chiefly in connection with the organization of overland commerce. Between the Mexican and Civil wars was its new period of life. Finally, in the seventies, it gradually receded into history as the tentacles of the continental railway system advanced into the desert.

The Santa Fé trail was the first beaten path thrust in advance of the western frontier. Even to-day its course may be followed by the wheel ruts for much of the distance from the bend of the Missouri to Santa Fé. Crossing the desert, it left civilized life behind it at the start, not touching it again until the end was reached. For nearly fifty years after the trade began, this character of the desert remained substantially unchanged. Agricultural settlement, which had rushed west along the Ohio and Missouri, stopped at the bend, and though the trail continued, settlement would not follow it. The Indian country and the American desert remained intact, while the Santa Fé trail, in advance of settlement, pointed the way of manifest destiny, as no one of the eastern trails had ever done. When the new states grew up on the Pacific, the desert became as an ocean traversed only by the prairie schooners in their beaten paths. Islands of settlement served but to accentuate the unpopulated condition of the Rocky Mountain West.

The bend of the Missouri had been foreseen by the statesmen of the twenties as the limit of American advance. It might have continued thus had there really been nothing beyond it. But the profits of the trade to Santa Fé created a new interest and a connecting road. In nearly the same years the call of the fur trade led to the tracing of another path in the wilderness, running to a new goal. Oregon and the fur trade had stirred up so much interest beyond the Rockies that before Kearny marched his army into Santa Fé another trail of importance equal to his had been run to Oregon.