The fur trade taught us something of our own geography upon the North and Northwest, but it did more. It was a fur-trader who first developed the possibilities of the Spanish Southwest for the second expansion of our Western commerce. In 1823 General William H. Ashley, of the American Fur Company, made an expedition up the Platte, and is credited with first reaching from the East the South Pass of the Rockies, which was soon to become recognized as the natural gateway of the great iron trail across the continent. In the following year Ashley penetrated to the Great Salt Lake, and later reached Santa Fé, situated in territory then wholly belonging to Mexico.
DETAILS REGARDING SOUTHWESTERN WAGON-TRAINS.
The up-river men—cordelling boats on the Yellowstone.
The story of the Santa Fé trail has been told by many writers, and its chief interest here is simply as showing the eagerness with which the men of that day seized upon every means of transport in their power, and the skill and ingenuity with which they brought each to perfection. The wagon-freighting of the Southwest was highly systematized, and was indeed carried on with an almost military regularity. The route was by way of the Council Grove, then the northern limit of the Comanches' range, and it was at this point that the organization of the wagon-train was commonly completed. A train-master or captain was chosen, and the whole party put under his command, each man having his position, and each being expected to take his turn on the night-watch which was necessary in that land of bold and hostile savages. During the day the train moved in two columns, some thirty feet or so apart, each team following close upon the one immediately preceding it in the line. In case of any alarm of Indians, the head and rear teams of the two parallel columns turned in toward each other, and thus there was formed upon the moment a long parallelogram of wagons, open in the middle, and inclosing the loose riding-animals, and closed at the front and rear. The wagons were loaded, to a great extent, with cotton stuffs in bales, and these made a fair fortification. The Indians had difficulty in breaking the barricade of one of these hardy caravans, defended as it was by numbers of the best riflemen the world ever knew. Small parties were frequently destroyed, but in the later days a train was commonly made up of at least one hundred wagons, with perhaps two hundred men in the party, and with eight hundred mules or oxen. The goods in convoy in such a train might be worth half a million dollars. The time in transit was about ten weeks, the out trip being made in the spring and the return in the fall.
The Santa Fé trade lasted, roughly speaking, only about twenty years, being practically terminated in 1843 by the edict of Santa Anna. These difficulties in our Western commerce all came to an end with the Mexican War, and with the second and third great additions to our Western territory, which gave us the region on the South as well as the North, from ocean to ocean.
THE GOLD-BEARING WEST.