Dr. Josiah Gregg - Writer of the Trail

The caravan style of trading on the Santa Fe Trail brought an average of $130,000 a season which was a return of 10-40% for the men and their investors.  At the end of the 800 mile, 10 day journey sat the La Fonda Inn which was a welcome sight to the weary travelers.  Inside the alcohol flowed, gambling was open, and willing women were waiting.  Women at the La Fonda Inn were rouged checked, dared to show their ankles, and smoked small cigars - symbolizing the debauchery of the frontier to their plainer fare back home.

The results of this carousing and bribery was that Mexicans and Americans saw each other at their worst.  Local residents hated the noise, the boisterous invaders and most of all the traders.  One trader, Josiah Gregg, found the New Mexicans, "cunning, loquacious, sycophantic and crying."  He wrote that they were "untrustworthy, intriguers, and steeped in bigotry and fanaticism."  Dr. Gregg was a doctor from Jackson County, Missouri.  Ill health caused him to travel to Santa Fe in 1831 where he traded on the trail for 9 years.  In 1844 he published Commerce of the Prairies,  the best account of this period of southwest history.  He was the first to predict the extinction of the buffalo if nothing was done.  He served as a correspondent in the Mexican War and after the war, followed the Gold Rush to California.  In 1850 he died of exposure at only 43 years of age.

The teamsters' colorful tales of the Santa Fe trade - of Indian fighting and buffalo hunting, of dark-eyed senoritas and hidden silver mines - helped fuel the land hungry men coming to the frontier.  Traders eluded Mexican tariffs and ignored local laws, demonstrating Mexico's powerlessness along her northern borders.  The writing was on the wall as they say.

Next time...at the end of the trail
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Today in Pioneer History:  On  August 1, 1774, dissenting British minister Joseph Priestly, author of Observations on Civil Liberty and the Nature and Justice of the War with America, discovers oxygen while serving as a tutor to the sons of American sympathizer William Petty, 2nd Earl of Shelburne, at Bowood House in Wiltshire, England. (sorry only other pioneer news was the release of the movie Shane...)