12 of 12 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Interesting Facts And People From the Santa Fe Trail, August 16, 2002
This review is from: The Santa Fe Trail: Its History, Legends, and Lore (Hardcover)
This is a very thoroughly researched book that tells the tale of the trail -- A commercial trail that linked the American frontier in Missouri with Spanish founded Santa Fe and points south.
The author tells the story from the time of Spanish settlement of Santa Fe through it's abandonment in the wake of the railroad. In its hay-day, the trail linked first two cultures and then the disparate parts of the western United States. The linkage was tenuous and strenuous. Traders took first pack mules then wagon trains through several hundred miles of prairie -- some of it bereft of water and all of it through Indian country.
This book mostly tells how trade bloomed along the trail from the 1820's through the 1860's. This economic detail is well fleshed out by the stories of the many characters that plied the trail or supported its existence. Interesting incidents and first person accounts are liberally strewn throughout the work and give this book its appeal -- otherwise it would be a subject as dry as the short fork to Santa Fe.
I was left with a sense of wonder at the risks these traders and travelers took -- particularly the early ones. Around 1810 -1820, most Americans who reached Santa Fe were rounded up and jailed -- some for five to eight years. Even in the era when the vast majority of early trail blazers failed to return to Missouri, there were always new would- be entrepreneurs ready to set out the next season. Such was the spirit of pioneering Americans and the lure of riches. Even after Spain/Mexico decided to welcome Americans in trade, there remained fairly high chances of succumbing to Indians, weather, or lack of water. The incredible perseverance and relentless pursuit of this open trade route is remarkable -- particularly to a reader of our era.
Although the subject is somewhat dry -- this is a story about economics and transportation -- the author does an admirable job of using interesting characters and stories from the trail to enliven the work.
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8 of 8 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
Following the Trail, February 13, 2001
This review is from: The Santa Fe Trail: Its History, Legends, and Lore (Hardcover)
This is an excellent book for those curious persons who would like to know how the Santa Fe Trail developed. David Dary has written a real history book that is very pleasant and charming while it gives you a lot of facts about the commerce on the Trail. Dary begins with the history of the Spanish exploration of the New Mexico area, the establishment of Santa Fe as a focus for Spanish control over northern expansion, the effect of the Mexican Revolution against Spain, and the increasing interaction with and fear of the Anglos from the East. The commerce between towns in Missouri and Kansas with Santa Fe is described in detail. The importance of Santa Fe as the site for exchange of American goods for Mexican silver money is explained. The eventual decline of Santa Fe and the Santa Fe Trail becomes clear in the descriptions of the American military takeover of Santa Fe, the treaty of Guadalupe-Hildago, and the shift of transportation from wagon trains to the transcontinental railroad. The book has some amusing anecdotes along the way describing the colorful characters that played a part in the folklore about the Trail. The more recent history from 1900 to 2000 is given less space. The rebirth of Santa Fe as a tourist center is briefly explained but what seems missing is how this town of about 67,000 people has become now the third largest art market in the United States. New York and Chicago have larger art markets but are enormous cities by comparison. There is no mention of the influence of artists,such as Georgia O'Keefe. Perhaps this is because this book is less a history of Santa Fe itself as it is a excellent view following the Trail across Missouri and Kansas to Santa Fe.
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7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
The Great Western Highway., March 6, 2005
Francisco Coronado. Juan de Onate. William Becknell. Kit Carson. Jedediah Smith. Bent's Old Fort. Fort Union. Fort Larned. Fort Dodge. Raton Pass. Glorieta Pass.
Names resounding with history, lore, enterprise, bravery and honor; conjuring up images of treks and trading posts, stagecoaches and scouts, gunfights and gold seekers, cowboys and cavallery regiments, blizzards and buffalo herds, Indians armed to their teeth, army forts, dust, mud, heat, and just about every other cliche in the book of Western storytelling. And, of course, the name that connects them one and all: that of the Santa Fe Trail, the 900 mile-long famous trade route linking Missouri and Kansas with the West until the advent of the railroad in 1880.
Already used by Indian traders long before the white man's arrival, the trail was traveled by 16th century Spanish conquistadors Coronado and Onate during their northward advance from Mexico, searching in vain for the famed golden cities of Cibola. But regular trade relationships with the lands further to the east didn't develop until 200 years later, when the French began to send commercial travelers towards what was then known as "New Spain." This took a great deal of courage on the part of the envoys, not only because of the perils of a voyage into largely uncharted territory but also because the Spanish - seeing a threat to their territorial claims and their fiercely maintained trade monopoly in their territory's northern provinces - often imprisoned French and American parties caught south of the Arkansas River, since 1819 the boundary between the United States and New Spain and, as of 1821, the newly-independent Mexico. But Santa Fe merchants welcomed and secretly promoted trade with the U.S., which they saw as a way to get out of the Spanish government's stranglehold on the economy; and after 1821, the new Mexican government actively promoted trade with the U.S. American suppliers of whiskey, food, medicine, textiles and hardware soon gained profits up to 500 percent in the newly-opened market. After the Unites States' substantial territorial gains resulting from the 1846 - 48 Mexican War, which also included New Mexico, the U.S. Army built a number of forts along the trail to secure it against increasingly fierce Native American raids, which however only stopped with the forced migration of the Indian nations to government-assigned reservations in the 1870s, shortly before the trail's history itself came to an end with the arrival of a railroad locomotive in Santa Fe in early 1880. In 1987 - a little more than a century later - Congress designated the Santa Fe Trail a national historic trail.
Over the course of its history, the Santa Fe Trail saw some of the most prominent faces of the old West; from William Becknell, whose 1821 trip made the city of Franklin, MO, its first major eastern terminus, to Kit Carson, barely sixteen years old when he started working as a wagon train teamster in 1826, and Jedidiah Smith, who reportedly killed no less than thirteen Comanches before succumbing to their lances near Cimarron Spring in southwestern Kansas in 1831. Events such as the 1862 battle at Glorieta Pass, where Union troops crushed Confederate hopes of taking over New Mexico as a major Civil War prize, and the 1864 Kiowa raid of Fort Larned's entire herd of 172 horses, further fueled the danger-shrouded, mythical status of the trail, its travelers, and the events surrounding both.
David Dary's fascinating "Santa Fe Trail" condenses the trail's history into a little over 300 pages, leaving ample room, however, for the dramatic stories, achievements and failures on which the fame of the "great western highway" is built. Despite its richness in detail, Dary's prose is engaging and easily holds the reader's attention (not surprising, given the subject matter). While it certainly helps to have at least a minimal understanding of the described events' general historic context, the author's narration makes up for any bits and pieces that may have slipped the reader's recollection and also adds numerous lesser-known pieces of information, without neglecting to establish the relevant larger historic framework, such as the development of money trade in North America and the Lewis and Clark expedition, and their respective impact on the development of a trade route into Santa Fe. To a substantial extent, the book draws on primary sources: travel accounts and journals, trade invoices, contracts, newspaper articles, government documents, and more; many of them from Dary's own library - the number of illustrations alone bearing the note "Author's Collection" will be hard-pressed to find their equals elsewhere. (No small wonder: Dary reveals in the introduction that his interest in the trail's history goes all the way back to his childhood.) While a few larger maps might have been desirable - those that are provided are somewhat difficult to read - this is no serious shortcoming; the author's considerable descriptive gifts largely make up for the lack of easily decipherable cartographic devices, and the photographs, drawings, sketches, and paintings supplied throughout the book provide ample food for the reader's imagination in fleshing out the stories' narrative core and visualizing their protagonists. Although not reveling in the often bloody details of the trail's history, Dary pulls no punches, neither in his own summary of the events nor in the selected quotes. For example, he concludes the history of the whites' interactions with Indian tribes along the trail with an excerpt from Charles E. Campbell's "Down among the Red Men" (1928), beginning with the unequivocal statement that "[t]he origin of nearly every war with Indians can be traced to some offense on the part of the white man."
The book ends with a detailed glossary, annotations by chapter, as well as a fourteen-page bibliography: for the serious enthusiast, these alone should make its acquisition a virtual no-brainer. But even a first-time visitor to Santa Fe or any of the cities along the famous trail - heck, even an armchair traveler - will find plenty to marvel, agonize over and enjoy here.
Also recommended:
On the Santa Fe Trail
New Mexico: An Illustrated History (Illustrated Histories)
Spain in the Southwest: A Narrative History of Colonial New Mexico, Arizona, Texas, and California
Four Corners: History, Land, and People of the Desert Southwest
The New Encyclopedia of the American West
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