When I lived and worked in Kansas City during my journalism journeys, I was not that far down the road from Independence, the place where all the trails heading west started in the 1800s. Dana Fuller Ross wrote a series of books - the first one titled, appropriately enough, Independence - based on one family's travels along those trails. Any lover of history, such as myself, is familiar with these trails: Santa Fe Trail, Oregon Trail and California Trail.
When I moved to New Mexico along those same journalistic journeys, I visited many of the historic sites along one of those trails - Santa Fe Trail. There are places along the way where the ruts left by the wagons moving along the trail are still visible. Sites still explain the history in Trinidad, Colorado and in Raton, Springer, Watrous, Fort Union, Wagon Mound, Las Vegas and, of course, Santa Fe, where a marker on the Plaza marks the end of the trail for those early settlers who braved the wilderness 200 years ago.
Numerous books, both historical and fictional, have been written about this famous trail.
When William Becknell's mule train creaked, snorted, and jounced into Santa Fe on November 14, 1821, a metaphoric earthquake shook New Mexico’s dusty soil. For more than two centuries, the Spanish government had barred outsiders from the region. But under the flag of Mexico, new freedoms emerged - among them, open borders that made Becknell’s maiden voyage possible on what became Santa Fe Trail.
“It changed everything,” says historian Doyle Daves, a Las Vegas, New Mexico, resident who has assessed the trail’s impact for decades. Newfangled hoes, files, saws, and axes became available, along with bolts of fabric and a host of sewing supplies. Farmers quickly sold out of their fresh produce and soon expanded their fields and increased their herds. Laden with silver, gold, furs, and wool, the wagons returned to Franklin, Missouri, 100 miles east of Kansas City, creating a new economic platform for New Mexicans.
Within 10 or 15 years, according to Daves, New Mexico was totally integrated into the American commercial system and began to cut ties with Mexico. New Mexicans did not necessarily like the Americans, but they did like the economic consequences.
The 1821–1880 glory days of the trail delivered both the triumphs and the tragedies of manifest destiny - newfound wealth and improvements in education and healthcare, but also lost land rights, two wars, and a brutal push to “subdue” Native people.
All along its two primary routes through Missouri, Kansas, Colorado, and Oklahoma, the trail’s 200th anniversary was commemorated late last year. The historical time stamp hit its final mark in Santa Fe with events that included a sneak peek at a historic trading post and a reenactment of Becknell being greeted by Governor Facundo Melgares at the trail’s end, on the Santa Fe Plaza.
Carole Wendler, deputy superintendent of National Park Service's National Trails Office in Santa Fe said the way we often describe the trail is that it is like a string of pearls. When you think of it around someone’s neck, you do not see the string; you see the pearls. But the string holds the whole thing together. The trail was like the string, and the pearls are like the sites along the way - Rabbit Ear Mountain, Wagon Mound, the Las Vegas Plaza, and the Santa Fe Plaza.
The trail is easy to follow starting in Trinidad, Colorado, as historic markers at a museum indicate the place where a cutoff from the main trail passed through the border town, Then, signs along Interstate 25 state "Auto Trail, Santa Fe National Historical Trail" carrying drivers all the way through the pass into New Mexico at Ratón on the Colorado state line - the original 909-mile Mountain Route that promised more reliable water, but also treacherous high-elevation passes. As one drives south, the mountains and hills soon give way to seas of grass. Alongside I-25, herds of cattle and pronghorn mingle in the fields.
A majority of trail riders chose the shorter Cimarrón Route, which bore gentler terrain but less water and the potential of sometimes violent clashes with Indigenous residents. Those travelers looked for the volcanic ridges of Rabbit Ear Mountain, now private ranch property near today’s Clayton, New Mexico. It told them they had arrived in New Mexico and that campsites with water, grazing grass, and firewood were near.
The highway passes through the village of Wagon Mound, so named because people on the trail thought one butte resembled a covered wagon. When travelers arrived at Fort Union, northeast of Las Vegas, they were able to stay the night, water their horses and gather supplies. The frontier fort is now a remnant of what it once was - a protection from enemies and wildlife. The fort now consists of eroded buildings and a visitor center explaining the history of the trail and a regular tour called "walk the ruts," where visitors can see the ruts left by wagons over two centuries ago.
The trail follows along a flagstone sidewalk, passes by the old hospital, jail, storehouses, and barracks, then keeps going until it reaches the short-grass prairie surrounding the fort. The view mirrors what trail riders would have seen, with the exception of a few invasive species. “This valley has been relatively untouched over the last 200 years,” the tour guide says.
Rangers at the site have followed existing footpaths made by Indigenous people and the Spanish explorers and settlers who came before them. “People, like rivers, take the path of least resistance,” the guide says.
The fort was built 30 years after Becknell's first trip, part of a United States plan to support the trail’s commerce and protect riders in what was traditional tribal land. During the next 12 years, it was rebuilt twice more; today’s ruins come from its 1866 version.
The fort saw action during the Civil War. After that, people of Scottish, Irish, and German descent came to New Mexico. Women found opportunities, as did formerly enslaved people. The mix fed a bloody period in the 1870s and ’80s. “All of this in the West was fought and paid for at a very high price,” the guidebook states. “It’s easy to romanticize, but it gets much darker when you get to the events in between.”
Visitors follow a gravel road until at last they reach the wagon tracks. “Imagine these wagon trains seen from miles and miles away, the clouds of dust,” the guide says. Grass and wildflowers grow in the ruts today, but during the trail’s heyday, he says, “it would have been a road you could easily identify in this valley.”
Farther down the trail, near the village of Pecos, just south of Santa Fe, the Kozlowski Trading Post once welcomed travelers with an assurance that their eight-to-ten-week journey was nearing its end. The post later became part of Forked Lightning Ranch, owned first by rodeo entrepreneur Tex Austin and then by actress Greer Garson.
Pecos National Historical Park took ownership in the 1990s but could not begin renovations on it until about three years ago. Becky Latanich, the park’s chief of interpretation and education, said.
She explains that the building will have a map overlay on the floor in the entry. The map, according to Latanich, will show at scale the distance to Missouri from Pecos. The post’s rooms will hold exhibit text about goods traded along the trail. It will be done from the vantage point of the story of two children who were connected to the trail.
As part of the renovation, cutouts made in the stucco walls show the original adobe bricks underneath. The ones that crisscross over one another indicate the post’s original room; bricks that run in a vertical line were part of an addition.
Outside, where New Mexico Route 63 replaced the original trail, a wall rises into a high arch that holds a bell. The opening had to be big enough to accommodate a wagon going through. Restoration work will restore it to the size it would have been when the trail was still active.
The trail officially entered Santa Fe along Museum Hill on a street that still bears the name of Santa Fe Trail and Pecos Trail. Evidence along the way indicates how the trail changed the state.
As a lover of history, when I lived in Santa Fe and Las Vegas, I loved digging into the history of Santa Fe Trail, but those tales are often fraught. The history that is under the rubric of manifest destiny and its social consequences needs to be understood and rethought as younger generations begin exploring their own connection to the land and its history.
Its impact persists, but by 1880 Santa Fe Trail itself had begun to fall silent. That is when the first train chugged along a rough approximation of its route from Ratón into Santa Fe. A stone marker near the southeast corner of the Santa Fe Plaza speaks to the trail’s end, as did an 1880 headline in a local newspaper: “The Old Santa Fe Trail Passes into Oblivion.”
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