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.  

Surprising Landscapes

So, where is the landscape this picture portrays?  

Oklahoma! In fact, only twenty-five miles northeast of Oklahoma City, on I-44 heading towards Tulsa.  Oklahoma conjures up images of dusty plains and flat, nearly treeless landscapes, when the opposite is true for much of the state.  Not long after one enters Oklahoma from the Texas panhandle, for example, do trees start popping up everywhere.  That said, the land still has a very "western" feel to it, complete with rocky bluffs and "mid-grass" prairie, but the transition between east and west is a bit more compact down here.  

The south east corner, down where Texas, Arkansas, and Oklahoma have a meeting, even boasts a native population of shrub palms, Sabal Minor, along with baldcypress and other subtropical plants and trees.  In the southwestern corner, far removed from the Rockies or even the Ozarks, are the Wichita Mountains, rising from the plains.  Oklahoma is yet another example of how there are truly no "fly-over" states, and that something exciting exists even in one's seldom appreciated backyard.  

Turning Northwards

Summer is on the way again.  We had a solid week in the upper 70s and lower 80s, and the cooler 50s predicted for the upcoming days keep getting pushed back further in the forecast.  Sure, we might have another frost, but the leaves are already popping on the trees, and the grasses are coming back to life again.  As such, my mind turns northward, ready to discover more of why Michigan is called a pleasant peninsula (though it has two).

This was taken from one of the scenic viewpoints on Pierce Stocking Scenic Drive, one of the most lovely drives in Michigan, and the most comprehensive tour through Sleeping Bear Dunes.  A trip around it gets you access to the dunes, interior lakes, several types of forest, and detailed descriptions of what you are looking at by way of signs and guidebooks.  With the exception of the boreal forests that occur on the Mio Plateau in the upper center of the state, nearly every ecosystem that occurs in the northern upper peninsula can be found here.   In the picture above, in fact, that is pretty much the case.  While it might seem that there are only forests and lake-shore, what you see are two different types of coniferous forest, several different types of hardwood and mixed forests, swamps and bogs, riparian habitat, beaches, dunes, and of course, the freshwater marine world of Lake Michigan.

Wednesday "Filler": Friendly Faces at River Raisin National Battlefield Park

I have been putting this off for a while now, because I wanted to give it a serious post, but my guilt has got the better of me.  If you are even still reading, hello to my friends down at River Raisin National Battlefield Park, you have not been forgotten!

The Raisin was an important fight in the western theater of the War of 1812.  The second battle was an important victory for the Americans on the road to the Battle of the Thames, where Tecumseh finally met his demise.  The battles also largely spelled the end of any French-American cultural independence in Michigan, as the town of Monroe (then Frenchtown) was devastated by the assaults, and the locals just decided it was better to pack up and move on.

The park is also one of the newest units in the National Park system!  It's nice that south east Michigan is getting a bit more national attention, to say nothing of how 1812 is starting to get some recognition. Expect a series of posts on this place as I explore it in more depth in the coming year.  For now, be treated to a cannon, on a sled.  Yes, how much more Michigan/Ontario can you get than that?

If you live in the region, consider giving it a visit.  They have an impressive museum there, one of far better quality than I have seen at civil war sites.

Neo-Gothic Churches in North America: A Little Bit of the Old Country in a New Home.

In the middle and late 19th century, the United States, and to a lesser extent, Canada, saw an increase in immigration among German and other northern European peoples.  Such peoples made their way inland and to this day their descendants continue to populate the areas shown on the U.S. Census map below.

A great deal of these immigrants were Roman Catholics, and quite proud of their heritage.  The villages and cities that they left behind often had grand monastic or cathedral parishes, and they wanted to re-create something of that world of majesty in the new lands that they would settle.  Coinciding with this desire to establish a little bit of Europe in North America was a Victorian penchant for romanticizing the medieval past, while also elaborating on it with gilded ribbed vaulting and dark, rich wooden interiors.  The new styles caught on amongst the immigrant populations, perhaps in part because some types of wood were still relatively inexpensive and readily obtainable.  The result was a vigorous building of grand parish churches that beautified a somewhat bleak industrial era urban landscape.  On the Plains, in some of the smaller towns, these churches tend to really stand out.

Kansas, somewhere off of I-70

Then, in the cities, we have places like St. Patrick's Cathedral, which, while dwarfed to some degree by modern structures, adds a presence of soul and lasting culture to an otherwise heavily commercialized street like Fifth avenue.  St. Patrick's was a bit of a different story from many of the other Neo-Gothic churches built further inland, however.  For the most part, it was a project endorsed by the ruling ecclesiastical authorities (Archbishop Hughes came up with the concept in the first place), and it had ample funding from rich donors and poor parishioners alike.  Non-Irish communities were usually not as fortunate, and sometimes German, Polish, and other ethnic communities had to fight with the predominately Irish bishops just to get the rights to form a parish in the first place.  That, however, is a story for another post.  Let's take a look at one of the German parishes.

This is St. Joseph's, built between 1870 and 1896.  She is still an operating parish, and one that offers everything from your typical Sunday Mass to traditional Latin Masses and the odd Mass now and then in German.  Like many parishes in urban cores throughout the United States, its membership has dwindled somewhat in recent decades because of demographic shifts, but it still serves the neighborhood, and its setting and architecture draw visitors from far and wide.  Want to take a look inside?

While it is something of a misnomer to label her a "typical" American immigrant Neo-Gothic parish church, what you see above is generally what one will see in such churches.  Overall, St. Joseph's has a majestic simplicity to it.  Not every edge is painted, not every window is as grand and detailed as the next (funding situations often resulted in windows being installed in stages, and thus not all turned out the same, or were even completed as desired), but the place is clearly beautiful.  All three nave stretches are equal in height, which was apparently inspired by southern German "hall church" styles.  Much of the structure was raised by parishioners, and many of the windows and other decorations were locally produced in Detroit.  When the community had to stretch the budget, they did, but in general, they wanted to leave a lasting monument to their perseverance and faith, and thus spared no expense.  Instead of using plaster, carvings in the church were made from wood.  The window below, imported from Innsbruck, Austria, is more evidence enough of a desire to build a truly majestic monument and temple.

The scene depicted is the death of St. Joseph.  Now, this is one of those photographs that does not do the window justice.  The colors are absolutely brilliant, and I could only image what the Church would look like if the rest of the windows were produced by the same people from Austria.  Of course, the other windows are just as lovely, and by no means should my admiration for this piece be a sign that the Detroit artists were inferior.  Costs aside, the parishioners could have probably imported more art from the old country, but they chose not to.  This was Detroit, this was their new home.  The local artists poured their hearts and souls into a true labor of love, unashamed to be compared and seen next to foreign talent.  In fact, some of the earliest use of American architect firms in producing stained-glass design is found in the other windows, which can all be seen on the parish website, linked above.

St. Joseph's is one of the many churches in Detroit that is worth a visit.  The history of a hard-working and determined immigrant community can be seen quite visibly here.

Sunday Afternoon Post: Pine Barrens and Cacti

Most people are surprised to find out that grasslands and savannas exist well into places like New Jersey and Ontario.  In northern areas, such as this picture taken near Manistique, Michigan, savannas are usually referred to as "pine barrens".

The famous pine barrens of Long Island and New Jersey also fit the description of a pine savanna, and are some of the last remaining non-governmental undeveloped land in the eastern United States.  In Michigan and Ontario, pine barrens can be found wherever the soil is sandy and relatively low in relief.  The eastern upper peninsula happens to have many scattered pockets of such land, especially on the margins of some of the coastal sand flats (but not dunes, which are a different ecosystem altogether).  In Ontario, scattered pine barrens can be found along the lower drainage of the Petawawa River, a vast outwash plain that served as one of the last primordial glacial melting rivers.

I plan to bushwhack the area quite a bit in the coming year or so, as I plan to write my dissertation on the development and existence of Opuntia Fragilis in northern Ontario, Quebec, and the Ottawa valley.  Fragilis is a prickly pear cactus, and supposedly one of the most cold hardy in the world, having migrated north and east on the heels of glaciers from refugiae during the last glaciation.  I have a suspicion that it might be more widespread in our local barrens than has thus far been documented.  For those wondering, Michigan and Ontario have two species of native cactus, Fragilis and Opuntia Humifusa.

The Humifusa seen above is wrinkled and recovering from its winter dormancy.  This was taken at Kitty Todd Nature Preserve, part of the Oak Openings Region of the Toledo, Ohio area, though Oak savannas and Humifusa can be found scattered in remnants throughout southern Michigan and southern Ontario, as far north as Saginaw and Peterborough, where they transition out and are replaced by the pines.  Yet again, here we see the delightful mosaic and interconnected ecosystems that make up our continent, a world where pines, grasslands, and cacti meet in a marriage of seemingly distant partners.

Michigan is not Flat

Well, maybe it is down around the southern part of the state.  Up around Cadillac, however, I was amazed to find this:

This would be southbound M-37 heading toward Mesick.  The locals call anything north of this area "northern Michigan", which is quite funny, as the upper peninsula usually gets left out of that definition.  Enough rambling for now, the weather is simply too nice to be inside complaining about the lack of relief that there seems to be in these parts.