Meanwhile in Santa Fe Plaza

To get an idea of the community of Santa Fe in its infancy, let's visit the town square, or plaza which is the center of commerce and community.

The square is noisy - clanging caravan bells, hawking peddlers, arguing traders, and shouting wagon master arriving in town.  At 10 am everyone is eager to do business before the midday heat drives most inside to the coolness of thick-walled whitewashed rooms or the tree shaded courtyards around the private homes. 

In 1835, the 4,000 residents of Santa Fe welcome the caravans as a break in their isolation imposed by Spanish trade restrictions, lack of roads and navigable rivers.  The Santa Fe locals trade in pinon nuts (from mountain scrub pine), sheep, goats, and coarse wool.  They have a limited outlet for their products.  Their tools are primitive with no craftsmen or manufacturers. 

To the American traders, Santa Fe means safety after weeks of danger and with luck, good profits. One trader wrote "arrived at last in the strange place to which our wild love of novelty lead us - excitement tingled through our veins."

What makes up the town plaza?  As wagons enter the plaza's east side from the road to Pecos, they cross San Francisco Street.  It leads to the cathedral with its shady portales.   Beyond are the snow capped Sangre de Cristo Mountains.  They stop at the ornate customhouse to unload goods for inspection.  Adjoining the customhouse are the shops, in the rear is a placita (little court) which is shared by private homes.

The hotel welcomes wagon crews with clean beds, bathing facilities, meals of chili and lamb, costly liquor and free nightly dances.  The wagon master goes to the fashionable salon of Spanish gambling, La Tules.  Shrewd, wealthy and bejeweled, the owners is an aristocrat respected in New Mexican society. 

The trader's paymaster pays the crew - some in goods, others in gold coins.  The men, from seven countries speak diverse languages.  The trader's partner, a shopkeeper, checks goods brought to his shop on the plaza's south side.  His store, like the others, have interior wooden shutters and barred windows without panes. 

Next time...more inside the Santa Fe Plaza.
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Today in Pioneer History: "On August 4, 1873, while protecting a railroad survey party in Montana, Custer and his 7th Cavalry clash for the first time with the Sioux Indians, who will defeat them three years later at Little Big Horn.

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...)

Santa Fe - Quaint, Trading Town

Santa Fe was a quiet town of flat-roofed adobe houses of 3000 in 1821.  It was the commercial center of the Rio Grande Valley for 40,000 ranchers and estate owners.  Prior to 1821 the Spanish had always dealt harshly with those few Americans who tried to do business in Santa Fe - even jailing or fining them heavily as well as confiscating their goods.

An accidental meeting in 1821 re-opened commerce in Santa Fe and also signaled the beginning of the end of the Spanish speaking Southwest.  On September 1st William Becknell left Franklin, Missouri with a party of 20 frontiersmen intending to visit the Plains Indians and swap manufactured goods for Indians pelts and horses.  In the Raton Pass,  the Americans assumed that jail and confiscation would follow when they were confronted by a party of Spanish speaking soldiers.  However, the soldiers were extremely cordial, explaining that Mexico had just overtaken the Spanish rule and they were eager for friendly contact with the US.  The American traders would be more than welcome in Santa Fe.

Becknell and his men wee delighted by their good fortune and hurried off to Santa Fe, receiving a warm welcome from its citizens.  The Becknell party returned to Missouri in 1822 carrying saddlebags of Mexican silver dollars.

Becknell set forth again the following spring with three heavily loaded wagons.  This time due to his heavy wagons he chose to go south of the former route to blaze the rather flat Cimarron Cutoff.  It was a dangerous decision which almost cost his entire party their lives.  While crossing the 50 mile Cimarron Desert his party ran out of water and it was only by drinking the liquids from a freshly killed buffalo that they survived at all. 

Raiding Indians also plagued the party of their journey.  The path Becknell took became known as the Santa Fe Trail, stretching some 800 miles from the border of Missouri to New Mexico.

Next time...the Wagon Caravans of Santa Fe

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On this Day in Pioneer History: "On July 25, 1832, the first recorded railroad accident in U.S. history occurs when four people are thrown off a vacant car on the Granite Railway near Quincy, Massachusetts. The victims had been invited to view the process of transporting large and weighty loads of stone when a cable on a vacant car snapped on the return trip, throwing them off the train and over a 34-foot cliff. One man was killed and the others were seriously injured.

First Southwest Settlements

Juan Onate brought along to California with his settlers, slaves, and missionaries, grain and fruit tress, 7000 Spanish cattle (ancestors of the Texas Longhorn), sheep, goats, burros and most importantly a herd of horses.  The descendants of these horses transformed the culture of the Plains Indians.

As he moved east, Onate commandeered a native "pueblo" or town (the name gives the area's Indians their names) and here just south of the Rio Grande and Rio Chama, he established the first Spanish settlement in the Southwest - San Juan in 1599.

Onate was appointed governor and the settlers had trouble from the beginning like most farming settlers.  Instead of cattle, sheep seemed to survive better.  There were droughts and crop failures that forced them to move across the Rio Grande to San Gabriel where they were just as hungry and defeated.  Many settlers returned to Mexico without any gold, without any food either.

Onate was accused of mismanaging the colony.  He told the government to send him necessary supplies for the settlers or relieve him of his duty. And Madrid's answer arrived in 1609 as the new governor moving the entire colony to Santa Fe..  The new governor lead the settlement to such prosperity that it became a major Spanish outpost for decades.

Next time...Missionaries
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On this Day in Pioneer History: On May 26, 1864, President Abraham Lincoln signs an act establishing the Montana Territory. Sidney Edgerton, the territory’s first governor, fled after suffering through several months of Indian raids.