The Santa Fe Trail

In 1821 William Becknell and five comrades traveled from Franklin, Missouri to Santa Fe, New Mexico, then the northern provincial capital of New Spain, the first Americans to do so legally. And thus was born the Santa Fe Trail, a nine hundred mile long road of commerce to a foreign land. During New Spain’s reign, foreign trade had been forbidden, but that changed when Mexico wrested control from the European empire in 1821. Never an active immigrant highway, selling merchandise to goods-starved Mexican residents and returning revenue to economically starved Missouri was the Trail’s primary purpose. During the formative years but one town, San Miguel del Vado, forty miles east of Santa Fe, existed along the Trail. By the mid-1840s Mexican merchants were dominant, and their children were sent to American schools. The Mexican-American war erupted in 1846, and Brigadier General Stephen Kearny led the Army of the West into battle along the Trail. The victorious United States acquired much of the southwest, from Texas to California. This changed the nature of the Trail when the many military forts that were built to secure the peace required provisions. During this period the trailhead gradually moved west as the railroad chugged in. In 1880 the railroad reached Lamy, New Mexico, twenty miles south of Santa Fe, and there the Trail died. The present work leads the reader along the Trail, describing specific sites and the nature of the area surrounding each, and the author’s experiences visiting them.