Freight Trails
In the first decades of the nineteenth century, government explorers such as Long, Pike, and Fremont surveyed possible routes across the Plains, with the purpose of connecting this vast area to the the trails across the eastern United States. Entrepreneurs looked at the trails as paths to money-making opportunities—delivering mail, freight, and passengers could be a lucrative business. The earliest route across the Plains was opened in 1821 by William Becknell, a Missouri trader, who followed a path that later became known as the Santa Fe Trail. It was established primarily as a commercial route between Kansas City and Santa Fe, eight hundred miles away, over which goods were transported on large wagons drawn by ox teams. Residents of Santa Fe were eager for American trade goods, because they were so far from their suppliers in Mexico City. Tools, dry goods, clothes, razors, and scissors were just some of the items in demand. Mexican traders provided carav going back to western Missouri with silver, hides, furs, and Mexican pottery and textiles. Freighters used large Conestoga wagons pulled first by mules, and then replaced by slower, cheaper, and stronger oxen.
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Map of the trans-Mississippi territory of the United States..., 1901 Courtesy American Heritage Center, University of Wyoming
There were two routes for the Sante Fe Trail in western Kansas. The mountain route, followed the Arkansas River to the foothills of the Rockies. This route involved travel across 230 miles of unprotected campsites between Fort Larned to Fort Lyon in Colorado. After the 1849 Treaty of Guadalupe-Hidalgo and the U.S. annexation of territory south of the Arkansas (present day southern Colorado, New Mexico, Arizona, and California), westbound emigrants in ever increasing numbers traveled the Bent's Fort route to the upper Arkansas, and journeyed northward by a trail along the base of the Rockies to the South Platte, sometimes on to Fort Laramie in Wyoming.(1)
By the late 1860s, the Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe Railroad was laying tracks westward. Wagon caravans picked up goods at the railhead, decreasing the length of the trail as the railroad grew. In 1872 the railroad was completed to Raton Pass on the Colorado border, and in 1880 to Santa Fe itself spelling the end of the Santa Fe Trail.
Deer Creek Station William Henry Jackson Courtesy Scotts Bluff National Monument, William Henry Jackson Collection.
Goods shipped via stagecoach and wagon enabled commerce in new settlements to grow. The stagecoach was the Greyhound bus of its day, linking settlements large and small as they sprung up across the West. Stages often ran twenty-four hours a day in order to make their advertised schedule of twenty days to the coast. They stopped every twelve to fifteen miles to change teams and every fifty miles to change drivers. Here, in a William Henry Jackson painting, a stage is coming to a station stop on the prairie.
Stagecoaches used horses or mules, usually four, but sometimes as many as ten animals, per team. Towns with no rail connections depended on the stage for passenger travel, supplies, new furnishings, and goods for stores. Early tourists in the Colorado mountains used the stage to get to towns off the rail lines. This view shows a stage bringing visitors to the new Beaumont Hotel in Ouray, Colorado.. Ouray was a mining town, but also had numerous hot springs that functioned as early health spas.
In the Golden West by Chas. Bayha & Rubey Cowan, New York : York Music Co, c1913. Courtesy University of Colorado at Boulder Music Library
Being a passenger was somewhat of an endurance test. Jolted, squeezed between sweaty or chilly bodies, sleepless—these were not journeys for the comfort loving. Horace Greeley, traveling on an 1859 coach to Colorado, wrote, “I am but a passenger and must study patience."(2)
Early in the twentieth century, after most people no longer had to ride stagecoaches, they took on a romantic aura. This sheet music cover of 1913 gives a heart-stirring picture of a ride down a steep, rocky hill behind what seems to be a runaway team. The title of the piece, “In the Golden West," doesn't match the drama of the illustration.
1. Kansas Heritage Group. Sante Fe Trail History. Retrieved from: http://www.ku.edu/heritage/trails/sfthist.html
2. Greeley, Horace.(1860) An Overland Journey, from New York to San Diego in the summer of 1859. Retrieved from the Making of America project at: http://www.hti.umich.edu/cgi/t/text/text-idx?c=moa;idno=AFK4378.0001.001
