he
old days; between law and order and individual lawlessness; between
the school and the saloon; between the home and the dance-hall; between
society united and resolved and the individual reverted to worse than
savagery.

Chapter VI. The Pathways Of The West

Since we have declared ourselves to be less interested in bald
chronology than in the naturally connected causes of events which make
chronology worth while, we may now, perhaps, double back upon the path
of chronology, and take up the great early highways of the West--what we
might call the points of attack against the frontier.

The story of the Santa Fe Trail, now passing into oblivion, once was on
the tongue of every man. This old highroad in its heyday presented the
most romantic and appealing features of the earlier frontier life. The
Santa Fe Trail was the great path of commerce between our frontier and
the Spanish towns trading through Santa Fe. This commerce began in 1822,
when about threescore men shipped certain goods across the lower Plains
by pack-animals. By 1826 it was employing a hundred men and was using
wagons and mules. In 1830, when oxen first were used on the trail, the
trade amounted to $120,000 annually; and by 1843, when the Spanish ports
were closed, it had reached the value of $450,000, involving the use
of 230 wagons and 350 men. It was this great wagon trail which first
brought us into touch with the Spanish civilization of the Southwest.
Its commercial totals do not bulk large today, but the old trail itself
was a thing titanic in its historic value.

This was the day not of water but of land transport; yet the wheeled
vehicles which passed out into the West as common carriers of
civilization clung to the river valleys--natural highways and natural
resting places of homebuilding man. This has been the story of the
advance of civilization from the first movements of the world's peoples.
The valleys are the cleats of civilization's golden sluices.

There lay the great valley of the Arkansas, offering food and water, an
easy grade and a direct course reaching out into the West, even to the
edge of the lands of Spain; and here stood wheeled vehicles able to
traverse it and to carry drygoods and hardware, and especially
domestic cotton fabrics, which formed the great staple of a "Santa Fe
assortment." The people of the Middle West were now, in short, able
to feed and clothe themselves and to offer a little of their surplus
mercha