[Illustration: 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.