The Santa Fe Trail was an overland commercial route between Independence, Missouri, and Santa Fe, New Mexico. It was used from the establishment of the Republic of Mexico in 1821 until railroads put it out of business in the years following the Civil War.
For 300 years, Spain had protected her empire in the Americas by forbidding the visits or residence of foreigners. After the United States achieved independence from Great Britain in 1783, American traders or explorers who ventured into Spanish territory in the Southwest were routinely arrested and confined. However, after gaining independence from Spain in 1821, the new republic of Mexico pursued a policy of trade and open access. One dimension of this new direction was the law that Stephen F. Austin used to colonize Texas. Another was the opening of the southwest of New Mexico to trade. When William Becknell, the first Missouri trader to visit under the new policy, returned to Missouri in 1822 with bags of Spanish silver, others were anxious to follow his example. In summer that year, Becknell returned to Santa Fe with a wagon train of goods, pioneering a route across the Cimarron desert that avoided the hazardous Raton Pass across the Raton Mountains linking southeast Colorado and northern New Mexico. As subsequent trading expeditions began using this route, Becknell became known as the “Father of the Santa Fe Trade.”
By 1824 Becknell and other merchants had established a regular trade with Santa Fe, with gross returns that year on the order of $200,000. With the appearance of regular caravans on the trail, the Indian peoples adjacent to the passage—mostly Kiowa and Comanche—began regular raids on the wagon trains. The combination of profits for Missouri traders and Indian raiders brought the trail and its trade to the attention of the U. S. government. Senator Thomas Hart Benton of Missouri introduced legislation to mark the trail and protect the traders. In 1825 one law provided for an official survey of the Santa Fe Trail and a second appropriated $20,000 to negotiate with
The Indians for a right of way. Beginning in 1828, military escorts accompanied the wagons, but this protection ended after two years; thereafter, the traders had to defend themselves.
As William Becknell was from Franklin, Missouri, for the first few years, this town marked the beginning of
The trail. By 1830, though, the starting point had become Independence, a town at the bend of the Missouri River that had become the staging place for overland travel to the West. From Independence, the trail ran south and west to Council Grove, across the Arkansas and Canadian Rivers to San Miguel on the Pecos. From this point, the wagons moved directly to Santa Fe over Glorietta Pass. An alternate route from the Arkansas River ran west to bent’s fort and thence south over Raton Pass to Santa Fe. The second trail was longer and steeper, but it avoided most of the Indian dangers and the 60-mile Cimarron desert. Many chose the alternate trail because of Bent’s Fort (completed in 1832), the most permanent and secure outpost on the southern plains. Whatever the southern route of the trail, the end of the 800-mile journey was Santa Fe. With a full load of wagons, the trip from Missouri to Santa Fe took three months. The return trip with empty wagons took perhaps half that time.
Arriving at Santa Fe with the trail and its dangers behind them, the American traders now had to deal with customs duties and the officials who collected them. The entrance into the town could be a frustrating and sometimes expensive exercise. Taxes levied on the Santa Fe trade were arbitrary and inconsistent. Mexican officials charged with enforcing the customs laws were virtually independent of oversight and far removed from Mexico City. Little of what was actually collected found its way into the national treasury. Sometimes powerful individuals levied their own duties. For some time, Governor Manuel Armijo levied his personal tax of $500 on each wagon. Faced with such an array of officials and charges, the American traders evaded them at every turn. Sometimes they used little-known trails. They also tried to sneak into town in the middle of the night, a difficult feat in view of the warm welcome accorded them by the Mexican population.
The arrival of a wagon train in Santa Fe was a moment of universal enthusiasm. The Mexican peoples lined the street to celebrate. The business of the day transacted, the drives and the local population met at a fandango, a raucous public dance that provided a suitable end to the privations of three months on the trail and often ended in personal confrontations of various kinds. Whatever the social occasions, the business of the trail and its trade was good for Santa Fe. Leading town merchants had stores on the square, and the Mexican merchants sometimes traveled to Independence to choose their goods. Even with the vagaries of customs duties and officials, the 1830s was a time of mutual accommodation and prosperity for the Santa Fe Trail and for its twin terminals of Independence and Santa Fe.
Beginning about 1840, the Mexican government became less welcoming. The Texas Revolution had showed the dangers of American immigration and commercial connections. The independent Republic of Texas claimed boundary lines to include the upper Arkansas River, placing Santa Fe within its territory. Although Texas was never able to extend its authority over Santa Fe, its presence and expansionist policies disturbed Mexican officials. In 1841 the Republic of Texas mounted an invasion of New Mexico. Although the enterprise failed, it added to the uneasiness that seemed to surround the regular arrival of caravans of trade goods and traders from Missouri.
In 1846 the outbreak of the Mexican-American War confirmed the Mexican view of American designs on Mexican territory in the Southwest. In the summer of that year, General Stephen Watts Kearny occupied Santa Fe and claimed New Mexico as part of the United States. In 1848 the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo confirmed the cession of New Mexico to the continental American empire.
The Santa Fe Trail now assumed a new and expanded form. Mexican officials and customs duties disappeared with American sovereignty. The U. S. Army constructed a series of forts along the trail to protect wagon trains, and traffic expanded to include mail and stagecoach service. The discovery of gold in California in 1848 and the subsequent California gold rush further enlarged the business of the Santa Fe Trail. By 1855 the volume of trade reached $5 million annually.
Trade along the Santa Fe Trail continued during the Civil War (1816-65), enlarged by supplies sent to Union military forces assembled to meet a perceived Confederate threat in the West. With the arrival of the Southern Pacific Railroad in Santa Fe, the trail vanished as a trade route. Having served the Republic of Mexico and the United States for a half-century it was a symbol of the significance of trade in the opening of the Southwest.
Further reading: Josiah Gregg, Commerce of the Prairies, edited by Milo Milton Quaife (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1967); David Lavender, Bent’s Fort (Gloucester, Mass.: P. Smith, 1968).
World History
