The Santa Fe Trail: The Start of U.S.-Mexico Relations

The Mexican-American war, while perhaps the most important event in the history of the relationship between Mexico and the United States, was not the first meeting of the two nations.  Rather, through commerce and migration, the countries had a relationship dating back to the early part of the nineteenth century.  Mexico was still a Spanish territory when Americans began showing up in Tejas, Nuevo Mexico, and Veracruz.  The men who came to these places were explorers, merchants, and mercenaries, even some fur traders from distant Canada.  Here and there, business of all sorts happened, at least when the authorities were not around.  The peoples of Mexico were more than happy to engage in commerce with the more friendly and generous faces than those which came from across the ocean.  Time and again, however, the Spanish authorities intervened, and the Americans found themselves arrested or deported, just as Canadians, eager to find more fur-trade opportunities, had been many times before them.

Americans still made their way to Mexico, in greater numbers once the Louisiana Purchase was validated by Spain in the Adams-Onis Treaty of 1819.   Spanish bans on Mexican exports still stood, even if relations between Madrid and Washington were becoming more civil.  Like so many of his contemporaries, William Becknell took a gamble that maybe things were getting peaceable enough that trade might sneak by a bit easier.  In September of 1821, Becknell departed from Missouri and set out across the Great Plains toward the capital of Nuevo Mexico, Santa Fe.   About 40 miles out of Santa Fe, at a place known as San Miguel del Vado, Becknell and his five companions were approached by soldiers.  While no record remains of what took place at this meeting, not too much imagination is needed to envision that it was a cordial affair, because Becknell was informed that Mexico was now free, and that Santa Fe's markets were ready and waiting for commerce with the rest of North America.  When Becknell arrived in the city, crowds gathered and a great celebration began.

He quickly found buyers for his small stock of textiles, and he found goods and silver to bring back with him in exchange.  Mexicans wanted textiles, especially the very desirable cotton, which the United States was starting to produce in abundance.  Americans like Becknell gladly accepted silver pesos for it, but they also brought back draft animals, herbs, spices, exotic jewelry, and an amazing rich of mineral wealth of all kinds.  They also found furs; French and English speaking Canadians alike, usually working for the growing Hudson's Bay Company, were part of a vast network already working the interior of the continent, and well-informed about what was going on to the south.  In many ways, Santa Fe commerce was the start of relations between all three North American nations, and the city was very much an international hub of activity.  In any event, Becknell came back to Missouri with a smile on his face and much-needed silver currency to fill the cash-dry economy there with.  The next year, he loaded covered wagons, the first to cross the plains in fact, and did it all over again.  By 1824, traffic between Santa Fe and Missouri had started to impact the American economy enough to prompt President Monroe to order a survey of prominent trail routes between the lands.

The opening of relations was profitable for both parties, and Mexican traders took to the trail just as often as their American counterparts did.  Commerce often did not stop in Santa Fe, and the wagons went clear from Independence to Chihuahua and points southwards.  Santa Fe, however, was the juncture between the worlds of the United States and Mexico, and the city engaged in so much American trade that eventually most of New Mexico's dealings were with a far closer United States than with seemingly distant Mexico.  This is not to say that Santa Fe or the New Mexicans surrendered their culture and identity in the process.  While the New Mexicans embraced becoming a part of the United States during the Mexican-American war, they also retained their language and unique culture that had developed as a marriage between Native and Hispanic worlds.  To this day, many New Mexicans are completely bi-lingual, and cities like Santa Fe celebrate their heritage even as they are undoubtedly American in loyalty and character.  The area still celebrates the link it serves as between the parts of our continent:

Otherwise known as I-25.

The Santa Fe trail, after all, was about introducing cultures to one another, blazed in the forging of ties between two young republics, an opening of borders to commerce and migration.  The opening of the trail was a tender embrace between America and Mexico, and is all too easily forgotten in the wake of a century and half of mistrust, bigotry, power struggles, politics, and drugs, between the two neighbors.  Memory remains, however, and regardless of where one stands on the issue of relations between our two nations (which have really started to improve, despite what goes around), this world of a bonding between two nations can still be seen in what remains of the trail, especially in New Mexico.  Let's start down in Santa Fe,  then:

This part of New Mexico is the junction of the Rockies, the deserts of the southwest, and the Great Plains.  Not too much of a stretch of imagination is needed to see that this was once a world truly in the middle of the path between east, west, and south.  Everything here is distinctively New Mexican, right down to the bus stops.

Here we have a place that is obviously part of the United States, and yet also would not seem too out of place in Mexico, while not being entirely a product of either place.

They most likely did not know it, but the founders of Santa Fe picked a pretty decent location that would become the meeting place of many other "trails" to come in the future:

Moving out from Santa Fe, the trail, Us 66, and now I-25, skirts the southern end of the Sangre de Cristo Mountains (part of the Rockies) before spilling out into the Great Plains.  Pictured here is part of Glorietta Pass.

At the entrance to the pass, the trail passes just to the south of the ruins of the Pecos pueblo, preserved at Pecos National Historical Park.  Glorietta Pass, in fact, has served not only as a passage for the trail, but has been walked by Coronado and his conquistadores, fought over in the Civil War, and long served as the meeting place between Pubeloan peoples and the peoples of the plains, such as the Kiowa and Comanche.  Pecos is probably the most diverse point of cultural meeting in all of North America.  We will come see it in a future post.  For now, here is the view from the ruins, looking back west to the pass.

 The trail eases out at an angle into the high plains of northeastern New Mexico, leaving behind the pinyon-juniper forest and entering one of the most arid parts of the Great Plains, a grassland dotted with cholla cacti, sagebrush, and yuccas.  The golden grass waves in an almost ever-present wind that blows between the great air masses of the arctic and the tropics, and between mountains and seemingly endless plains.

Once in the plains, the trail diverges.  One path, historically considered the safest route, follows the base of the Rockies north into Colorado until it cuts across the land to meet the Arkansas river.  This route is largely followed today by I-25.  Some of the best preserved ruts of the trail can be found at one of its famous sites, Fort Union, where the other path of the trail leaves this one.

This other path cuts northeast-southwest across New Mexico, past dead volcanoes and into the panhandle of Oklahoma, which has some of the most open country in the entire world.  The experience is good for making us feel small when we otherwise feel like kings of the earth, to say the least.  We have the luxury of roads to do this on now.  One can only imagine what travelers heading down the trail must have felt when they saw this, at once both in awe and hoping that the ruts they traveled on would stay visible.

This path continues into surprisingly rugged parts of Kansas before meeting the other path again at the Arkansas river, at which point the trails cut clear across the open land towards Independence, Missouri.  Halfway between the river and Missouri, things would get a bit greener and arboreal again, with some trees even growing in the middle of the prairie, sentinels of the advancing edge of the eastern forests.

At Council Grove, the trail is well-defined, and a memorial sits on it to mark the spot where the United States and the Osage nation signed a treaty to protect safe passage across their homeland.  The town was named for both the treaty and the grove of trees that offered shelter to those getting ready to depart into the treeless expanses to the west.  One of the 12 Madonna(s) of the Trail, placed by the Daughters of the American Revolution, can be found here.

The trail then arrives at its eastern terminus, Independence, a very different place from Santa Fe.  Here we have the text-book definition of a Midwestern American town, a place that even in the 1820's would have been as much a great discovery for Mexican travelers as Santa Fe was for the Americans and Canadians.  The tour we took from west to east was to highlight the impression this must have made on such travelers, heading from the vast, open, dry, adobe west to the relatively more compact, settled, humid, brick and mortar east.  Just as Santa Fe served as the door to Mexico and the inter-mountain west (including the Old Spanish trail to California, by way of Utah), Independence was the place where the California and Oregon trails would start, as well as points to the east, serving as the western terminus of the National Road, which would take people all the way to the Potomac at Cumberland, Maryland.  Here too, in those days of optimism so long ago, could there be found the various peoples of the continent, trading with one another, exchanging cultures, and getting ready to set off across the land to some destination of promise.  No record remains of any parties thrown when the first Mexicans arrived in Independence, but it was quite likely that the meeting was a good one.