Santa Fe Trail
For over half a century, beginning in the 1820s and lasting until the railroads were completed in the 1880s, the Santa Fe Trail was the primary link between the United States and the Spanish and Mexican Southwest. Running from the Missouri River ports around present-day Kansas City, the trail angled along the banks of the Arkansas River, splitting west of what’s now Dodge City into two routes: the Mountain Branch, which US-50 follows, and the quicker but more dangerous Cimarron Cut-Off, across the arid plains of the Jornado del Muerto. The two branches rejoined before climbing the Sangre de Cristo Mountains into what was then, as it is now, the capital of the Southwest, Santa Fe.
Unlike many of the routes across the Wild West frontier, the Santa Fe Trail was established by commercial traders rather than emigrant pioneers, and travel along it was active in both directions: Merchants from the United States brought manufactured goods by the wagon load, which they exchanged for Mexican silver. First blazed by trader William Becknell in 1821, the year the newly independent Republic of Mexico opened the border (which Spain had kept closed), the 750-mile-long trail was surveyed by the U.S. government in 1826, and traffic increased slowly until the Mexican-American War brought Santa Fe, and all the land in between, under U.S. control. Military forts were established to protect traders from the marauding Comanche and other native tribes; at the time of the Civil War, commerce along the trail reached at peak, with over 5,000 wagons making the trek to Santa Fe, carrying over $50 million worth of trade goods. The extension of the railroads across the Great Plains in the 1870s diminished the importance of the trail, and by 1880, when the Santa Fe railroad reached Santa Fe itself, the trail became a part of history.
Though US-50 follows the Santa Fe Trail almost exactly, from Las Animas east to Kansas City, very little remains, apart from outposts like Bent’s Fort and Fort Larned and a few all-but-invisible stretches of old wagon ruts. Numerous plaques mark historic sites, and it’s still possible to get a powerful sense of what the trail might have been like—provided you take the time to park the car and walk even a few hundred yards in the footsteps that crossed here a century ago.
The following are some of the most evocative sites along the Santa Fe Trail, west to east.
Santa Fe, NM: The second-oldest city in North America, preserving a vivid taste of its Spanish, Mexican, and American past.
Bent’s Old Fort, CO: A reconstructed adobe trading post along the banks of the Arkansas River in the Rocky Mountain foothills.
Dodge City, KS: One of the best-preserved remnants of the original Santa Fe Trail wagon ruts stretches across the rolling farmlands just west of this Wild West landmark town.
Fort Larned, KS: A well-preserved U.S. Army fortress, intact since the 1850s and protecting a fine set of wagon ruts.
Council Grove, KS: The last American town on the trail west, hardly changed since the heyday of the trail.
Westport, MO: Now surrounded by suburban Kansas City, this was the real start of the trail from the 1840s on.
Independence, MO: The original start of the Santa Fe and the Oregon Trails, with a fine museum detailing the westward frontier movements.
