Path carved history into New Mexico; so did those who traveled it

Founded in mid-November 1821 by failed businessman William Becknell, the trade-driven the Santa Fe Trail started in Missouri and ended in Santa Fe, under Mexico’s control when that nation broke free of Spanish rule earlier that year. It was a profit-driven venture, ostensibly aimed at selling goods from the East to those in the Southwest — where the traders would purchase and pack up goods to sell back in the United States, less than a half-century removed from declaring its independence from England.

Historians and Santa Fe Trail experts say, the rutted and dangerous pathway provided one of the first collisions between three distinct cultures — the westward-driven Americans; the Native tribes they encountered along the way; and the Hispanos who’d been in the high desert for more than a century and looked with equal parts curiosity and wariness at the visitors from the east.

Though the Santa Fe Trail started as a commercial enterprise, Joy Poole (co-founder of the Santa Fe Trail Association) said eventually the U.S. military used it to build forts, push westward and fight — and win — the Mexican-American War of the late 1840s, which resulted in the signing of the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo and the acquisition of the New Mexico territory.

The trail also changed the way people in the Southwest lived, with difficult-to-obtain goods such as metal and iron utensils, cotton and silk fabric and new types of food, including canned goods, becoming part of daily life. In return, those traders could return home with silver coins and mules. The famed “Missouri Mule,” Poole and other historians say, was actually a New Mexican mule.

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