traveled up the
Arkansas River and into the Rocky Mountains of Colorado, and landed as
a prisoner in Santa Fe of New Mexico.

The news that he brought back, of New Mexico and the way to get there
(an easier way than his own round-about tour) encouraged the merchants
and capitalists of St. Louis to hope that a trading route, back and
forth, might be opened with Mexico. Calico, cotton, shoes, tobacco,
trinkets and the like were to be sold for gold and silver, or exchanged
for buffalo-robes, beaver-furs, blankets, and wool--all at one hundred
per cent, profit over the original cost. Mexico manufactured very
little, and was eager for American goods.

As the result, through the country of the Kiowas and the Comanches
there was opened the great Santa Fe Trail of the merchants and traders.
From the Missouri River at the Kansas border it struck out into present
central Kansas, headed southwest to the Arkansas River, and passing on
across the desert into northeastern New Mexico arrived at old Santa Fe,
seven hundred and seventy miles.

The other great national trail, the Oregon Trail of the fur-hunters,
was long a pack trail, until the wagons of the emigrants and
gold-seekers to California began to throng it. The Santa Fe Trail soon
became mainly a wagon trail, for the Santa Fe caravans.

From the Missouri River the traders set out, twenty, thirty, forty
wagons in a train--huge canvas-covered Conestogas, thirty feet in
length with boxes six feet in depth, carrying three tons of freight and
drawn by eight span of oxen or mules. From the lead span's noses to
the end-gate of the wagon the length over all was thirty yards. These
Santa Fe wagons were not prairie schooners; they were prairie frigates.

Thus they lumbered on, at not better than fifteen miles a day; and
during their fifty or sixty days' trips out, loaded, and their forty
days' trips back, partly empty, the Kiowas and Comanches, the storms
and the hot dry desert, saw to it that they did not have easy sailing.

Among the early Santa Fe traders were the Bent brothers, Charles,
William and George, of a large and well-known American family. Their
grandfather Silas Bent had been captain of the Boston patriots who in
1773 dumped overboard the English tea on which the Colonists refused to
pay a tax; their father Silas Bent, Jr., was first judge of Common
Pleas in St. Louis; their younger brother Silas III became a naval
officer and discovered and charted the warm-wa