The Way to the West / and the Lives of Three Early Americans: Boone-Crockett-Carson

in some way they must have done so. Dwellers in Chicago think of New York, and it means New York in a straight line due east. They think of California, and it implies a stra

the course of a journey; the sole question is as to the time that journey will require. The railroad men do our thinking for us. We do not concern ourselves with ho

cross them was equally straight, because the railways now make it so easy. Yet as a matter of fact the railways proceeded, without much difficulty as to exploration, to lie sure, for n

am of an iron road, and many years after we had dreamed of it, we made our way from the Missouri to the Rockies, over the Rockies to the Pacific, by the same methods that had brought us to the heads of all our Western rivers. We used the pack-horse and the wagon train. Those were the days of

, which could be called continuous only as far as the Spanish province of New Mexico. Commerce got westward even so far as California in some fashion, now and again,

ail up the Platte, over the South Pass and down the Columbia; a trail forgotten by most of the young men of to-day, and existing no more

far up the stream, and following the South Fork of the Platte down into the Rockies, which would bring the traveler within wilderness-touch of the Spanish settlements. La Lande, the perfidious trader, who so sadly left in the lurch his patron, the merchant Morrison of Kaskaskia, an

brothers, Frenchmen from the settlements along the Mississippi, started for New Mexico by the strange route of the upper Missouri River, getting far up into the big bend of the Missouri before they discovered that they were going quite the wrong way! Their belief that the Spanish settlements could be r

g over on the head of the Rio Grande instead of the Red River. It was at least a lucky mistake; and his captivity among the Spaniards was productive of very good results to the United States later on, one of its most important results being his suggesting the rout

around the dangerous Cimarron desert, and clung to the waters a trifle longer; yet the travelers would have none of it, but built their trail so direct from Independen

how early. For instance, we know that our hardy young soldiers, Lewis and Clark, to whom we habitually ascribe the credit of being the first white men up the great waterway of the Missouri, were preceded by half a century by the Frenchman, Sieur de la Verendrye, who took his two

all those hardy ancients who sought cheerfully and hopefully for the China Sea by way of the Green Bay portage, and the Wisconsin and Minne

traveled somewhat along this same pre-ordained trail of the Arkansas. Not all Spain could keep the feet of the young Anglo-Saxons out of that trail. There were always the adventurers; and there were always the trails there, ready, waiting, expectant, prepared for them. There is no reading so thrilling as the bare

of the Rockies, were the fur trader Phillibert, and the traders Chouteau and De Munn, of St. Louis, who bought out Phillibert's goods and men in the Rockies. Phi

e, stopped them. They fell back on the Arkansas, were caught by the Spaniards, had their goods confiscated, and so lost three years of time as well. Not even this pointed advice as to Spanish preferences served to hold back the west-bound men,

istory tells us how, in 1812, they imprisoned the first party of the white traders to venture into New Mexico after the return of Lieutenant Pike, the twelve men who made up the party of Baird, McKnight and Chambers, commonly called the party of McKni

nd Chambers, there is first-hand information in the form of a personal letter from J. M. Baird, of Louisville, Ken

rived his information from James Baird's sons, and they were much disgusted to have him print the name 'Beard.' All other writers seem to have derived their particulars from him. James Baird was my grandfather. He was personally know

the embargo rigorously enforced. He was arrested and imprisoned in Chihuahua prison for nine years and three months, until released by Iturbide in 1821. Chambers and McKnight started back at once. McKnight was killed by the Indians on the Arkansas River. Ch

nd expedition that made the caches near there (in 1822), and near where Dodge City now stands. Inman in his 'Old Santa Fé Trail,' chapter 3, says Bicknell[33] crossed the river at the Caches in 1812. No other caches were made in that vicinity. Bicknell was a trader with the Iatan Indians an

ws practically the same course. If any one is entitled to credit for the selection of the route, Lieutenant Pike ought to have it. However, my purpose is to ask you to correct th

rs before John McKnight, the brother of Robert McKnight, in the year 1821, undertook the long journey to Chihuahua, which seems to have resulted in the setting free of all these Americans. Coming back to the United States over the Arkansas River trail, Baird and the two McKnights met the Ohio man, Hugh Glenn, and his associate or friend, Jacob Fowler, who were already at Taos, regardless of the ill-fortune of

e wagons through to Santa Fé, and instead of hugging the Arkansas clear out to the mountains, he struck off southwest toward San Miguel, by way of the Cimarron desert, the risky but shorter route to which the later t

gain for the Mexican trade. Their second party, that which made the famous caches referred to in the grandson's letter above, was made in 1822. By that time there was little glory left for any one; and indeed,

strength of these great companies rendered the danger of attack by Indians very slight, and it is a fact that but few lives were ever lost on the Santa Fé trail, scarce a dozen in a dozen years. It was indeed irony of fate tha

eep on both sides of the fence in this matter. They wanted the goods of the Americans, but hated the Americans themselves. They tried to kill the trade with excessive frontier duties, yet allowed smuggling and bribery to any limit; and these latter two industries were accepted as

o besought the United States government to give them protection against the Texans. The latter did some things not altogether pleasant to recount, but were for the most part serving nearly right the government of the United States, which could so long hesitate in

y. This was not the case, for by 1843 the Mexican capital embarked in the commerce to the Spanish colonies was about equal to that of the American

come famous as the historian of the Santa Fé trail. Nearly all the later histories of that highway and its peculiarities are based upon Gregg's able work; which fact he himself points out with a certain plaintiveness in his later years (1846), stating that pillager

rn writer Parkman, keen mind and able pen as were his, was a very savage in his lust for "sport;" indeed worse than any savage, for the latter never killed for sport alone. Gregg was neither a Parkman nor a modern "lover of nature," but something much better, a man of forethought and of good sense. His protest at the waste of life and food in the wanton killing of buffalo is one of the most worthy things of his worthy book

l. We have heard of Kit Carson, as a teamster, as far to the south as Chihuahua, and know that in 1828 he hired out there to Robert McKnight, one of the long-time prisoners in that city, later prominently identified with the history of the trail. Different Missouri towns outfitted parties for the trading to the Southwest, among these prominently St. Louis, an

-off over the Cimarron desert, which the travelers would not forego. The first section of the trail, that from Independence to Council Grove, the place where the wagon trai

rs, raising crops that have, by the education of the years themselves, grown fit to endure that high, dry air, on the edge of the once rainless region. It was two hundred and seventy miles out to the Bend of the Arkansas, and two hundred and ninety-three miles to the noted Pawnee Rock, which to-day has a town named for it. Not crossing the Arkansas as yet,

as well as without landmarks. The erstwhile boom town of Ivanhoe, of which one remembers talk in county-seat wars as far back as 1886, a little town far down in the dry country, is near the line of the old trail. Reaching the Cimarron, the trail bent up that do

TO THE B

if less safe and steady than the wagon commerce of the prairies. From the Wagon Mound to the first settlements of the Mexicans, on the Rio Gallinas, was an easy stage, and to Santa Fé by this time all roads of the mountains thereabout pointed. It was seven hundred and eighty miles to Santa Fé, according to Gregg, the more modern chronicles making it seven hundred and seventy-five miles, the latter figures being

and the Colorado River country, between the end of the Santa Fé trail and the California country. The wagons did not go that way. The later railway drops down along the Rio Grande valley, just as did the

transportation charges. We speak of the Santa Fé trail as one of the great Western highways, but it was a halting and broken and arrested highway. It was not yet quite time for the straight leap across the

-day. The extent of the trade varied from year to year, and did not regularly increase; for though we note one caravan in 1831 taking out two hundred thousand dollars' worth of goods, we find that in

were their efforts to stampede the live stock of the traders. Upon occasion the United States Army was asked to escort a caravan, but this aid was not generally to be expected, especially since the worst part of the route, that infested by the Comanches, lay wes

re and the general line of American goods began its first westward way across the American borders. Sometimes the stocks were retailed, sometimes sold at wholesale, the latter mo

f Kaskaskia, was a man who came down-stream. The Northern man, the man of New England or New York, had not yet become very much of a Westerner. The West was not yet safe enough for him. Nor indeed was he to lead the vanguard of the men who, far to the north of the old Santa Fé trail, were building another, a greater and more significa

toward that state of affairs that Parkman saw when he visited the Santa Fé trail on his way home from the Rockies in 1846-the volunteers of Missouri, kindred to the men of Doniphan, who were straggling on out toward Mexico on an errand of justice that had long been overdue. Shuffling, angular, awkward, uncouth we may, with Parkman, admit these Southern-Western men to have been; each man his own commander, reluctant to admit a superi

he south, who had done naught in all their lives but butcher and hesitate, butcher again and vacillate. They were not sad to take on the institutions of the United States in exchange for those of Spain. The Old World had not established i

ting to Mexico and the trans-Isthmian canal; to an America wholly American; and to an Orient that again and by another trail is destined to be our West? We may spill our oratory, may deplore utterly and sincerely, yet we shall not prevail to build any wall high enough to stop this thing. The Old World might combine for the time against the

e been those of transportation; its great successes have been those built on transportation problems ably mastered. To-day this American people waxes somewhat flamboyantly boastful, according lightly and cheerfully to itself the title of the greatest nation of the wor

3

ost authorities given as "Becknel

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II; "Early Explorers

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for instance Chitten