ndise to some one else in sale. They had begun to export! Out
yonder, in a strange and unknown land, lay one of the original markets
of America!

On the heels of Lewis and Clark, who had just explored the Missouri
River route to the Northwest, Captain Zebulon Pike of the Army, long
before the first wheeled traffic started West, had employed this valley
of the Arkansas in his search for the southwestern delimitations of the
United States. Pike thought he had found the head of the Red River when
after a toilsome and dangerous march he reached the headwaters of
the Rio Grande. But it was not our river. It belonged to Spain, as he
learned to his sorrow, when he marched all the way to Chihuahua in old
Mexico and lay there during certain weary months.

It was Pike's story of the far Southwest that first started the idea of
the commerce of the Santa Fe Trail. In that day geography was a human
thing, a thing of vital importance to all men. Men did not read the
stock markets; they read stories of adventure, tales of men returned
from lands out yonder in the West. Heretofore the swarthy Mexicans, folk
of the dry plains and hills around the head of the Rio Grande and the
Red, had carried their cotton goods and many other small and needful
things all the way from Vera Cruz on the seacoast, over trails that were
long, tedious, uncertain, and expensive. A far shorter and more natural
trade route went west along the Arkansas, which would bring the American
goods to the doors of the Spanish settlements. After Pike and one or two
others had returned with reports of the country, the possibilities of
this trade were clear to any one with the merchant's imagination.

There is rivalry for the title of "Father of the Santa Fe Trail." As
early as 1812, when the United States was at war with England, a party
of men on horseback trading into the West, commonly called the McKnight,
Baird, and Chambers party, made their way west to Santa Fe. There,
however, they met with disaster. All their goods were confiscated and
they themselves lay in Mexican jails for nine years. Eventually the
returning survivors of this party told their stories, and those stories,
far from chilling, only inflamed the ardor of other adventurous traders.
In 1821 more than one American trader reached Santa Fe; and, now that
the Spanish yoke had been thrown off by the Mexicans, the goods, instead
of being confiscated, were purchased eagerly.

It is to be remembered, of cou