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...)

The Road to Santa Fe

On July 1823, the survey party began working their way across Kansas.  They had no means to make signs to mark their path through the short grass of the flat plains, so they mounded up piles of dirt and rock to mark special points and directions.

150 miles out from Fort Osage they stopped to rest under the last sizable grove of trees, which came to be known as "Council Grove".  Crazy Bill Williams brought 50 Osage chiefs and warriors to the camp for a 4 day negotiation session.  A treaty was signed which gave the men permission for the trail to pass through Osage territory unmolested for $800 worth of goods.

Within a week the team had left Council Grove and Williams again brought the leaders of the Kansas tribe to sign the same treaty.  On September 11, they continued on to the Arkansas River, stopping for 3 weeks (public affairs in those days were done casually and slowly).

It was during this three week period that someone pointed out that they needed Mexico's permission since most of the trip would run through their territory, so the request was sent to Washington and the Mexicans.  It took almost 9 months for an agreement to come from Washington and Mexico which by that time was too late.

Most of those interested in the Santa Fe Road project and they who were financing the work, were no longer interested. Sibley and Williams had left for New Mexico, and by next summer when the men tried to resurrect the project, but the dirt market by then had begun to erode away and the project was deemed insignificant .

Years later Walker commented that though they had not built a true road to Santa Fe or made the trail more convenient, they at least "broke the crust"...