Presentation
MS. MARY COLLINS BARILE: Well, thank you so much for coming out on what I thought was going to be a really rainy, awful night. So it's just -- now, it's just cloudy. I see a lot of old friends and I hope a whole bunch of new friends.
Where are my Santa Fe Trail fanatics? 'Cause I know there are Santa Fe Trail fanatics here, I know it. Okay, one, I don't believe that.
(Laughter.)
MS. MARY COLLINS BARILE: I do not believe that, but we'll get there.
One of the reasons I wrote this is my area of research is early theatre in America. And one of the first playwrights west of the Mississippi River was a gentleman called Alphonso Wetmore. I may touch on some of his stuff tonight, but he was the first historian of the Santa Fe Trail. He was also the first western playwright in America, which -- it's a part of him that not a lot of people know too much about. And that's how I came to the trail.
I started looking and researching work about Wetmore and his life. And I kept looking for the Santa Fe Trail book about Missouri. And, of course, I came across the wonderful classics, you know, and the modern ones, you know, David Dary. And some very, very fine books that are out there, but nothing that really looked at Missouri. It always seemed that we started sometimes in St. Charles then we leaped to Franklin and then we were in Kansas City and Weston. And in between, some books just say, and they start in Weston and then they were on the prairie.
I'm thinking there is 250 miles we don't know a lot about, you know, where did it go? Who were these people? So a lot of the journey I made was to discover new friends along the way, uncover some materials about the people on the trail, why it became the trail it became, and really how Missouri contributed to it. Which, I believe, is a lot more than -- it's often given credit for, I mean, everybody starts with William Becknell and we'll get to that.
And I really struggled with how I would present you something tonight that wasn't just reading a chapter or, you know, going on about something that maybe not everybody -- who knows about the Santa Fe Trail? A little bit?
AUDIENCE MEMBER: A little bit.
MS. MARY COLLINS BARILE: A little bit. Okay. I know a little knowledge is dangerous, but that's okay.
So I thought we would go through it chronologically and I would take some side trips into some stories about people, events, and places on the trail and then end up with some of the language that the trail contributed to us through Missouri.
There'll be questions at the end. So mark your text. I wish -- I'm also going to apologize because my book had to be in a series there was a lot of stuff I had to leave out. And that drives me nuts. So you're going to have some of that material that's not in the book tonight.
When do you think the Santa Fe Trail started? What -- what -- what date?
AUDIENCE MEMBER: 1821.
MS. MARY COLLINS BARILE: 1821. No. Okay. Can you tell I teach?
(Laughter.)
MS. MARY COLLINS BARILE: So this is going to be this give and forth, you know, actually, when Mexico was settled Santa Fe the "city of holy faith" was founded around 1610. And immediately people realized that it was a place from which either down south into Chihuahua, Mexico -- it was a place that would be a thriving mercantile hub. Now, it didn't appear that way to Americans when they got there, but given the few people who were trying to settle region. The "city of holy faith" is what it meant. 1610, I believe, is the beginning of the idea of the Santa Fe Trail.
Now, again, I'm talking about white settlement. I am not talking about too much in the way of Native American. I will touch on that, but I just want to clarify that I do realize that certainly white immigrants were not the first to be on the trail in Missouri.
You know, by 1739, French explorers had come over the Missouri River and were going down into Santa Fe, whether they were doing any trading, probably not. They may have been doing a little bit of missionary work or scouting out for trapping, which was very important.
By the 1790s, you know, after the American Revolution, a gentleman called Pedro Vial traveled from Santa Fe to St. Louis. He had explored the Southwest because he wanted to discover a way of linking the Mississippi and New Orleans and the Southwest with the eastern states. He had hoped to open trade with the Americans, but Spanish were absolutely fearful of American influence mainly because the Spanish were Roman Catholic. And the idea of letting a whole bunch of Americans in was particularly frightening.
So they made it illegal for Americans to enter Santa Fe. Generally, the few who did get in there were threatened with imprisonment or actually imprisoned. Now, probably the date that indicates really when the trail started was 1799. The Spanish realized that nobody was coming in to their area to settle, again, some religious, some economic reasons. So they had a really great idea, they invited Daniel Boone to settle in the Spanish possession.
And that way he was well-known, he was respected, everybody knew that where Daniel went, you know, trade and settlement would follow. So they did make him an offer. He would become a syndic, which was a judge of the area, the region, and he brought his family. Some settled in St. Charles, some went out to Marthasville, which is an amazing area if you haven't been to the Daniel Boone home.
By 1804, the trappers from upper Louisiana had begun to work and trap and sell materials in Santa Fe. Now, what were they trapping? What was the most important thing they could trap in those days?
AUDIENCE MEMBER: Beaver.
MS. MARY COLLINS BARILE: The beaver, yeah, had been trapped out in other parts of Europe so America, now, because we use beaver for what?
AUDIENCE MEMBER: Hats.
MS. MARY COLLINS BARILE: The hats. Very, very important.
In 1805, Nathan and Daniel Morgan Boone were on a hunting trip and they were coming back through an area a little bit north of Franklin and Boonville and they came across a salt lick. It was a natural salt lick now is known as Boonslick, which is where the name came from. It gave the region its name. It was 150 miles up river from St. Louis and it was near the river. You can't tell that easily today, but the salt lick itself was quite close to the river.
So the Boones came up with an idea of boiling the water down, setting up a salt boiling operation. Those of you who have been to Arrow Rock have seen an example of it, a little diorama of it. And taking the salt down river to St. Louis by the bushel; they would ship it down there once, twice a month depending on how much they could -- they could process. It was sulfur, water and salt. It's really nasty if you go there on a warm summer day. You can still smell it. And they needed it for what, preservation of food in pre-refrigeration days and tanning. You could use it in tanning and dyeing. That's what they called the mordant, a biter. It bit into the fabric and it would take the salt -- it would bite into the fabric and allow the dye to go into the fabric.
And if you weren't careful then you ended up with fabric because the salt could also make it very harsh and it could break. But salt was one of the few things you had when you were dyeing that would hold the color in.
So it was very important. It was a flavor. It was a dye assistant and definitely for tanning. Native Americans used animal brains, you know, when you're doing a great deal of tanning you needed something more.
The elder Boone, Daniel, encouraged the sons to set up a business, however, he was not the one -- everybody seems to think it's named after him. Chances are he wandered through there because Boone was known to walk as far as, I believe, Yellowstone before his death. And -- but it was not named after him.
And it was interesting, the Boonslick became known as the area to settle. It was not only an area rich in minerals. It was an area rich in prairies and bottomlands and everybody wanted to settle in the bottomland because the prairies clearly were a waste of space. The bottomlands had malaria but they also had river -- you know, close -- closeness of the river. They didn't make the best choices so settlement became -- came in the river bottom and the Boonslick became quite famous. It was the area to move particularly if you were coming from the South and from the Northeast.
Timothy Flint noted, "For some cause it happened that in the west end and southern states attractive country gets the name as being more desirable than any other. The hills of the land of promise were not more fertile in milk and honey than are the fashionable points of immigration. Boonslick was the common center of hope and the common point of union for the people. Ask one of them wither he was moving to, the Boonslick to be sure."
By 1807, Zebulon Pike, an explorer and spy for the United States arrived in Santa Fe and is arrested. While he was there, he gathered as much information as he could about the city, the layout, who was in charge, how the people felt about dealing with Americans. The next year we see Fort Osage being built on the river. One, for protection before the War of 1812, but it also became a stop for the traders and the trappers as they were heading out West.
Colonel Benjamin Cooper settled that year in the area that we know as Franklin. And west of Franklin you can still visit the site of one of the forts, Howard County. They were ordered back by the government because of the uprising during the -- the beginning of the War of 1812 to St. Louis. And the people of the Boonslick region refused to return. And there's a rather touching letter saying, you know, we have our family, everybody's willing to fight. We have our muskets, please, send us, you know, lead. Please send us shot. They were pretty much on their own out there.
By 1810, there were St. Louis traders going to Santa Fe. The Mexican guide Manuel Blanco took them out there. The difference between later on was that they were not successful in their trading. The men were arrested and imprisoned for three years. So while they got to Santa Fe with the idea of trading, they never got back with anything worthwhile.
By 1811, you had the Boonslick being settled by people like Hannah Cole and the Coopers. They arrived into Boonslick and included with them were the first Black settlers. The Cole slaves Lucy and Isaac. The Coles settled on the south side of the river in present-day Boonville along High Street. And the Coopers went on the north side. We don't know why. They were separated during a snowstorm and a blizzard. The Coles were trapped on the Boonville side. They only had one turkey they were able to shoot and I think that had to do all of them for a week. They had to float the wagons across in between the ice floes. They took the wagons apart. Sometimes you could tar the center of a wagon and cover it and float it and make it somewhat water proof. I can't imagine doing that on the Missouri River in the winter because they arrived, I believe, it was late January. We don't know why. We don't know why they split up and settled.
By 1812, Robert McKnight, James Beard and several St. Louis traders reached Santa Fe and they were the first ones to bring mules with them. We'll talk a little bit about mules later. They believed that the Spanish government had been overthrown. They had gotten very bad information. When they got there, they were thrown into jail and they were in jail for eight years.
Now, jail in Santa Fe was not quite the same as jail today. They were held. They were not allowed to leave. Some of the men actually -- they married and they set up a household in Santa Fe and they later on became Mexican citizens. So they just couldn't come back.
When -- when Madison declared war on Brittan in 1812, U.S. constructed a series of forts including Hannah Cole's Fort over the Missouri River in Boonville. The land is actually for sale at this point, if anybody's interested. It was and remains the only fort named for a woman in the United States.
1817, in Arrow Rock the ferry was established. And among the people running the ferry were the Becknell brothers. They would later play an important role in the Santa Fe Trail.
In 1819 we're finally to an era of time when the trail was starting to be thought of. The Missouri Intelligencer and Boonslick Advertiser. It's my favorite newspaper. And it was the first one west of St. Louis that began publication. The descriptions of that area came from a gentleman called Stephen Long that was part of the Yellowstone Expedition. They wanted United States troops to travel up the Missouri River as far as the Yellowstone River and map it.
They provided four early steamboats. It was not successful. The steamboats would suck up the sand. They would run backwards. They would tip over. There were three of them, I believe, by the time they got to St. Louis. But the Western Engineer managed to keep going. And it was unusual. It was painted to resemble a serpent. And where the smoke came out was the serpent's face. They did this with the idea of frightening the Native Americans along the route. The Native Americans were not stupid, you know, after the first group saw them and realized it wasn't coming ashore and eating anybody, they quickly told everybody else up river.
So they would gather to watch this thing go by and get stuck and spin around and spit, you know, but the Americans liked to think they were frightening people. When Long arrived in Franklin he noted that -- and he was not, by the way, the year before was the first year that a private steamboat came into Boonville. And they had drinking. They did a lot of drinking in Boonville and celebrations and whatever, but it did not set up -- it didn't go beyond there. The steamboat turned around and went back to St. Louis. And everybody thought this would be the new breakthrough and, of course, it wasn't because the steamboats generally ran into things. Generally trees, dead cows and then they would sink and everybody would walk ashore and be very disappointed, so --
Steamboats did not work very early in Missouri's history. However, when Stephen Long did go -- come into Boonville, he noticed that there were approximately 120 cabins and they were located in the flood plain of the Boonslick. He was unimpressed with the setting and not more -- much more impressed with the sound -- with the town itself.
Fortunately, though, one traveler that year the Reverend John Peck an amazing man who traveled through the Boonslick and from St. Louis for many years and recorded a lot that we now know about how people lived their daily lives. He left vivid descriptions of life in Missouri in his -- one of the cabins he was talking a few miles above Boonville. "Seeing smoke in a little distance from the trail we were pursuing. We found a cabin about 12 feet square made of such rough, blackjack poles, with a solid wooden and dirt chimney. Very little chinking and daubing interfered with the passage of the wintery winds between the logs, the floor was earth and filthy and extreme. And the lodging places of the inmates were scaffolds around the wall and elevated of forks."
When they were building the cabins they would put tree limbs in and then prop up -- prop them up from the bottom and actually have sort of pallets for their beds. Peck was not impressed. He didn't understand how people would freeze to death out in the weather. He said, you know, if you trust to God an avoid doctors and keep your feet to the fire, you will always be safe. And I think that's good advice.
In 19- -- in 1819, hey, look a national panic. A bank panic happened. Many banks shut down or went into default leaving customers without their funds. The banks were not regulated by the government and they did not offer customers insurance for any of their deposits, of course. And in addition to hard money that were coins in silver and gold, the United States at that time and Missouri had many different kinds of currency. So you have an early settlement and you have essentially no money in that settlement.
The states issued their own coins. There were dimes, half dollars, half dimes; we didn't call them nickels yet, half pennies. People could strike their own coins, which led to the question: How much is the darn thing worth? So if I hand you a dime, how do I know that there is ten cent or a five dollar piece? How do I know there's five dollars worth of gold or silver in that? Well, one thing that people started to do was to mill the edges if you go feel for a quarter or something or a dime in your pocket, now, you'll feel milled edges, a little edging. That was to halt people who were shaving off the ends of the coins so they were -- if you do that to several hundred coins, you know, over the course of whatever if you're running store, you're gaining some money back here.
So they had to make sure that it hadn't been trimmed. They also had to make sure the coins weren't cased, you know, were they just dipped in gold or were they just dipped in silver? You know lots of them were bronze dipped in silver and then passed around as counterfeit coins.
Uncertainty spread in a very short time. Missouri's two banks failed. Everybody -- well, many people lost their capital and certainly any of their savings. Thomas Hart Benton suggested that the state base its economy on the actual value of the gold and silver and not on the face value of paper currency. His pushed for this earned him a wonderful nickname of Old Bullion, which was the word for metal money.
By the beginning of the Santa Fe trade and we're now around the 1820 -- early 1820s the Osage had lost most of their land. They only had 1,200 members by 1821. By 1825, the tribe had been removed to a reservation in Kansas. A gentleman named Morse had provided the United States government with a report on the Native Americans out here. He was from Connecticut. And he noted that there are 230 men in the Kansas tribe and 600 women, children and elders. He also listed with the Osage in the Kansas the Ioways who made occasional visits to Fort Osage and Arkansas branch of the Osage that were called the Chaneers, C-H-A-N-E-E-R-S. And I've never really been able to figure if that works with a particular tribe that still exists today.
Some sense of the Indians lives near the future Santa Fe Trail was captured in his writings about the Osage and Kaw or the Kansas. "They raised annually small crops of corn, beans and pumpkins. These they cultivate entirely with the hoe. The crops are usually planted in April and receive one dressing before they leave their villages for the summer hunts. About the first week of August they return to gather their crops, which have been left un-hoed and unfenced all season. Each family if lucky can save from 10 to 20 bags of corn and beans of a bushel-and-a-half each besides the quantity of dried pumpkins. On this they feast with the dried meat saved in the summer till September when what remained is, and what he said, was cashed or cache. And they set out on the fall hunt from which they return about Christmas."
Morris noted that the Native Americans in Missouri who lived around the trail enjoyed walnuts, hazelnuts, pecans, acorns, grapes, plums, pawpaws, persimmons, and wild root, such as hog potatoes in their diets.
In 1821, Missouri becomes a state and Mexico declared independence from Spain. At that point, William Becknell, who had lost his money and was not -- he was a farmer, he ran the ferry. He was not the best business man. Decided that he had to do something, his farm was in foreclosure, he was looking at losing what little land and what little goods he had, he had a family, he had fought in the War of 1812, he was a ranger out of St. Louis; helped build some of the forts. So he knew his way around rough regions.
He advertised for men to accompany him on a trapping expedition. This is one of the big points of the Santa Fe Trail when Becknell did not realize or know yet. He did not have the information that Mexico had separated from Spain and it was safe now to trade there. So in order to get around being stopped, he did check with the government and they pretty much said, hey, you know, if you don't tell us -- don't ask, don't tell.
So he had said that he was going on a trapping expedition. And he said as far as we wished to go. He really didn't have a particular place when he advertised in the Intelligencer.
He left. He took several men with him. Here's another mystery, we don't know who it was who went with him. My guess is there was anywhere between -- he had hoped for about 70; called for a meeting at Zeke Williams' house in Franklin, maybe about 50 people showed. He laid down the law. He said if we do this there are rules. Somebody's going to be the head of the -- it's like a military operation. You have to invest whatever we go (sic), whatever we get we bring back we equally divide.
Well, that dropped out another 30 people. So my guess is he probably headed out with about 20 people, among them slaves. They called them servants in most of the documents. They were quite ill on the journey. They had no idea of what this -- this walk was going to be. They took horses. They took light wagons. Little Dearborn wagons that looked like they were going out for a Sunday, you know, drive to church. They bought cotton, garish cottons and mirrors and knives. Things they thought they would be able to trade easily.
He went on the -- the southern route. There were several through Santa Fe. We won't go into detail with them there, but he does describe cutting across and up the mountains and losing a horse down one of the divides. It took them days to move rocks out of their way to just go maybe a half a mile or so. It was brutal, brutal traveling.
When they arrived in Santa Fe, they realized it had declared freedom from Mexico -- or from Spain and you could trade freely. However, there were two other groups there. We don't know who those groups were. We assume one came up from the Arkansas region and were trappers, fur traders. The other group very well may have been a group of traders who came in once they had heard, you know, through the mountain grapevine that Mexico was now open for trade.
So Becknell decided it was late in the year. He had two choices. Some of his men stayed there over the winter. He decided to head back. He spoke with some of the people who were there, learned that there was a possible another route that would skirt the mountains. He headed south. He was home by Christmas. He avoided bad weather. And the first thing he did -- one of the legends is that he rode into Arrow Rock and he opened up the bags and out dropped the clinking coins of silver and gold and that was a great story except Arrow Rock did not have those gutters at that point. So chances are he was ripping those things open in Franklin. But Arrow Rock likes that story. So we're going to leave it with them.
He returned to Santa Fe in 1822 and he took the first wagons which would eventually become known as the Santa Fe Wagon, but he knew that he needed heavy duty. He still was taking horses. Horses were relatively fragile. They were hard to feed. You had to carry feed with them, unless you could set them out alongside the road and let them forage. Within a few years, everybody had chewed up most of the grass along the Santa Fe Trail, which was another reason when they finally and soon introduced mules.
They were tough. They were easier to shoe. If a mule threw a shoe it could still walk. It wasn't happy about it, but it could still walk a little bit. The mules were tougher. They fought their way around things according to the -- the records while a horse would like leap into something and maybe get hurt. A mule would think it through and walk around it. Mules immediately became the way to move on the Santa Fe Trail. Hundreds of thousands were moved up and down the trail.
They did -- and Susan will be happy to hear this terrible environmental damage, you know, we think of the trail as -- you know, we always see these pictures and we see these night on a prairie and you have little wagon tracks and into the distance and isn't it romantic. We're heading to the sunset and we're heading west and la, la, la and meanwhile what we don't see, oh, the mules and later all the oxen eating everything. You know within about five years, I believe, seven years most of the great woods along the Missouri River had been cut down for forage. They just completely disappeared. You had pressure from both groups. You had white immigrants moving down the trail and you had Native Americans who were facing their own push in from the west.
In some cases it was war. It was some cases it was hunger, but everybody was trying to share the same space and it did a tremendous change to the environment, which we still see today.
You know, as might be expected, the frontier towns of Franklin and Boonville and I say them together as far as the beginning -- one of the beginnings of the Santa Fe Trail; Becknell left in 1821 from Franklin. Was that Franklin was built on the river. And the river would every now and then move in and take part of Franklin. Eventually everybody got bored with this and they moved to an area which we still call New Franklin. People whose houses were being destroyed by the river floated their log cabins, by some reports, across the river and set them up again in Boonville.
So you really had pretty much two starts to the Santa Fe Trail, two sister cities as far as the trail went. And the frontier towns were never humdrum and they were sometimes quite eccentric. In one issue of the Missouri Intelligencer, Wetmore who was Alphonso Wetmore served in the War of 1812 and lost his arm, was posted out along the Santa Fe Trail, he was a paymaster and he became the first historian of the trail and defender of the trail. He worked with Scott and with Benton in order to see if they could get the trail marked and preserved and patrolled for the traders.
But he wrote -- in 1822, he wrote about a gentleman called Mike Shuck or Michael Shuckwell was actually his real name. He lived along the trail. He came in and he was a trapper. He was a hunter. He came into Franklin frequently. And his appearance in 1822 did set the town a-buzz slightly. "He arrived at this village at twelve o'clock. He brought with him from his forest haunts a pet bear that accompanied him in the double capacity of companion and servant. This animal has been trained as to serve with great sagacity as a pack horse and Mike Schuck at his advanced age (who was probably 40) is no longer forced to bear the oppressive burden of his trapped beaver et cetera. I offered Mike a chair, but he threw himself down on an old trunk while his pack horse took possession of the chair."
(Laughter.)
MS. MARY COLLINS BARILE: Okay? People are starting to learn and realize that the Santa Fe Trail was commercial. It wasn't a place you went just to go see the sites and what would become New Mexico. It was rough, rough traveling. There was a section of it when you got across Missouri you were attacked by green flies which could bite the horses enough to weaken them and take so much blood the animals were weakened.
In fact, George Sibley, who was the factor out at Fort Osage, talks about and later on one of the surveys of the trail. They would drive at night. They would ride at night. They would wait until the flies gave up and then they would move as far as they could at night until the early morning when the flies would come again. The flies eventually disappeared. Thank goodness when the prairie was opened for farming. They thrived in the unplowed prairie region. They're still certainly around, but not the way they were.
The other thing they faced were clouds and clouds of mosquitoes, which brought on what we call ague or malaria. It was a bad enough disease that some people did die from it as they still do today, but many people lived with it whether they had a natural immunity to it we're not sure. But you generally would get the shakes and the fevers and the chills or the ague.
There was one story of a farmer who knew exactly when it was coming on so he -- he'd plow down his row. He would feel the shakes coming on. He would sit himself down, wait for them to stop and then get back up and plow the row the other way. People had to continue their life, but it was a devastating disease.
And there was really no way to deal with it until eventually a gentleman named John Sappington came along. Sappington lived in Arrow Rock. He was a doctor who also, rare for the time, observed what was going on. And he saw that the general way of treating people was to cup and bleed them. So you would take out -- anybody who ever sees anything like the Jane Austin. Somebody's always ill and somebody's always getting their veins opened up, so we can let the bad blood out. George Washington more than likely died from that when they were treating him for a sore throat.
So bleeding was about the only way and purging, which was the other way of empting everybody out. Was to clear out the body this just put people in a more weakened place and they would -- they would die. Santa Fe Trail was littered with graves, unfortunately. But Sappington heard of something called Jesuit's Bark or Peruvian Bark. He was laughed at by the medical establishment. The Jesuit's had been on missionary work in Peru. They saw that the native people were using a bark that had quinine in it and they would make a beverage from the quinine and give it to people and it actually helped control malaria.
Sappington decided, okay, people were starting to treat each other with what they called bark and wine. You would put the bark in some wine and you would let it soak and you'd try to drink it down. It was absolutely dreadful. And, of course, that lead to too many frontier jokes about, you know, people barking and wining, and somebody -- not understanding why they needed to do that to get over malaria.
So Sappington decided -- he came up with, I think, it was myrrh and licorice and the quinine and he created Sappington's Pills. And he did not keep it a secret. He published his mixture. He made it available to everybody. He did make pills. He sold probably literally millions of them. And one of the people who sold them was William Becknell. No fool he.
So anyone going down the Santa Fe Trail would stop and buy Sappington's Pills in Arrow Rock. So that was -- they were able to control that. Once they started to control malaria -- and you would hear people say, you know, I was so sick I didn't even know who I was with. I don't understand how people rode horses, moved goods, built campfires and survived in the wilderness all while suffering malaria. My Lord, it has to speak to the personality and strength of a lot of people today.
Again, the area by the 1820 -- 1823 – 1824, Franklin was the hub. Native Americans still visited and I won't read all of this, but I'll read you the beginning part. This writer, probably Alphonso Wetmore, wrote about the Natives would come in from the west to visit the trailhead. And he said, "They came in very commodious tents, or wigwams that they set up, they were made of flags of bulrushes about four feet long and so ingeniously sewed together as to be a complete protection against the wind and rain. One long piece placed vertically and supported by poles forms the wall of the building and two separate pieces the roof. These -- thus, when the people move are rolled together and are very light and portable. The floors are formed with bark and overspread with bearskins." Which is really fascinating. I've seen these houses made. You can make them with reed. They roll right up, you put them on the horse and off you go.
You would have seen this along the trail in the different settlements where Native Americans were visiting. What I did not copy here is the writer going on to say that they gave the Native Americans liquor that night. And they watched them get incredibly drunk and get into fights and burn some of their houses down. You know, they did this for fun. So it was a very uneasy truce along this trail.
In 1825, Thomas Hart Benton said that there should be a trail trade. He got Augustus Storrs and Alphonso Wetmore to write an account of the trail. This becomes the first trail's history. I'm sure many of you have read it. What's very interesting is Wetmore at the same time he was writing officially for Washington and saying, you know, I spoke to these people and this is what happened and this is what the trail was like and he went down the trail himself and wrote a later report and, oh, it's not a problem. This trail is so good for commercial use. We've got to market.
What's very interesting is that he turned around and wrote a series of essays that he published many years later when he owned a newspaper in St. Louis and he describes the same trip at that point and it wasn't all that easy. Aside from the flies, he -- there's an area of the trail that was called the La Jornada, "the dry place". There was no water. And they would go -- he tells the government, not a problem. We were in and out in a couple hours. Everybody was fine. But the story that he gave later on to his readers was that the dogs died, we nearly thought we were going to die. We had to drink muddy water. We don't know what was -- the buffalos had been rolling it, but it was green, but it was better than nothing. People are laying out at night and keeping their mouths open hoping to catch some of the dew.
So it's very interesting to see why we have some of the early trail stories saying this is a great -- this is wonderful. We've got to do this. Why? Because people wanted to make money, completely commercial. The truth of the matter was that many people died along the trail, in Missouri as well. You know malaria could catch you anywhere. In Missouri you had to walk across -- it wasn't until the 1840s that you could take the steam ships. And you could ship your stuff up from St. Louis, get out at Weston and then head across the prairie. So you were walking across the state.
Prince Maximilian of I guess Wied said it was a beautiful state. He loved the wildlife. He couldn't stand the flies. There was no where to eat, you know, it was a typical tourist. It's just Missouri was not the place for him.
One of the people who grew up and ran down the trail -- you know, we -- we talk about him, but again we have a little bit more of an interesting story. There's a gentleman called David Workman who came in from northern England. He's listed as one of the trail travelers on one of the early journeys. He shot a rattlesnake and then stepped on it and made some comment about Eve of the Garden or something. There weren't that many English men from this particular town so it had to have been David Workman.
In the 1820s, he had an apprentice Christopher Carson. And Christopher "Kit" Carson did not like learning to make saddles. He realized it was, you know, a skill. His father had died. His father had died when they were putting up a log cabin. A log cabin rolled on him and killed him. So Kit was apprenticed out to help the family. In 1826, he ran off to join his brothers down the trail. And although Workman had lost his assistant, he seemed to bear no grudge. Under the law, Workman was required to advertise for Kit's return and he did so several weeks later.
He put a notice in saying: "Notice is hereby given to all persons that Christopher Carson a boy about 16 years old, small of his age, but thickset, light hair ran away from his subscriber living in Franklin, Howard County to whom he had been bound to learn the saddlers trade on or about the 1st of September last. He was supposed to have made his way to the upper part of the state. All persons are notified not to harbor, support or assist said boy under penalty of law. One cent reward will be given to any person who will bring back the boy." Okay.
The advertisement is wrong on nearly all accounts. Kit headed west not north. He left in August not September and later descriptions call him slight, absolutely not thickset. Certainly nobody had time to go look for him and return him for the price of a penny. Good-hearted David Workman had given him a new start in life, because he loved the trail and eventually went down to Santa Fe and settled there himself.
I don't want to bore you anymore than you have to be. We had mules, we had horses, the next thing and finally the last thing that became the most popular on the trail, certainly in the later days when we were doing resupplying for the United States Army in the wars of the west, were the oxen. Now, they were brought onto the trail by one of Alphonso Wetmore's friends, Bennett Riley, Fort Riley in Kansas is named for him.
Riley was a good-natured not very well-lettered, but a wonderful leader and he was known for drinking. There's a story of his traveling down the Mississippi with another officer and they were arguing as to whether an island belonged to Mississippi or Illinois, so they directed the -- the boat to stop on the island. They got out, they dueled, nobody got hurt, they got back in and they continued on figuring that everybody's honor had been served.
And Wetmore actually used Riley in one of his plays and, I think, it's fascinating if we do look at some of these plays in this theatre, we can see who these people were, you know, and Bennett Riley was a not very bright, happy backwoodsman as portrayed by that.
The oxen were -- you had corn freight and you had -- the corn freight was for the horses, but the oxen could eat pretty much anything. They could forage. They could eat anything. You did not have to carry the food with them. The oxen were good because they worked on sand better when it got into sandy area. Riley figured out if you can pull two-thirds more or a third more of the weight of what it was you were shipping, whether it was military goods or a good for trade, you may as well go with oxen.
There was some drawbacks to the oxen. One, try to shoe an oxen on the trail; just try. If they fell over it took a lot of time to get an oxen back up. They would trek across any of our rivers here and get stuck in quicksand. Although there are some funny stories of having to pull mules out by their ears from the quicksand; the oxen would just absolutely panic and stop. And no oxen to my knowledge died in quicksand, but it was very, very tough to get out there and pry them out.
And, of course, the Native Americans realized that oxen were darn good to eat, you know, so oxen were lost. Mules were lost it was pretty expensive to go down the trail. You generally advertised that you were going. You tried to get some partners. If you couldn't afford it you would get a sponsor. You go down the trail, make your trades, come back. John Hardeman who was famous for his gardens out in Franklin, Hardeman's gardens he had -- was a wealthy man. He had gardens here, Penultima. Anybody know of Penultima in Jeff City? Well, he had gardens here with grapes, all kinds of grapes that George Sibley sent him. And Henry Shaw came to him as a young man to look at his gardens and he was inspired then to start the St. Louis Botanical Garden. Unfortunately, Hardeman believed that the Missouri River would never come out of the banks to where he was and he was wrong. It was, you know, a bad mistake.
One of the legends was for years along the Missouri River towards Franklin you would see rose bushes and they were the last remnants of Hardeman's famous gardens. He was also a Santa Fe trader and he headed into Santa Fe. The sad story was that he did not want to be away from his family. He had lost money when he lost part of his farm. He went with Alphonso Wetmore. They went south into Mexico into Chihuahua. Eventually, they ended up in New Orleans. They boarded a ship and Hardeman died on the ship from cholera. He never got back to Missouri.
And to bring this because otherwise you'll fall off the chair, I think, my favorite story though is when you get out to -- towards Kansas what do you have lots of? Nothing. Right. But there's nothing that kind of moves. What do you have in Kansas that moves? We get them a lot. They jump the line and then we go hysterical; wind. We got lots of wind. And around the late 1840s, you had a couple of people who decided that 1846, the Independence Expository announced, "The wind wagon works. Mr. Thomas ran up and down the plains with his wagon at pleasure. It is his intention to move his family to Independence and with a partner to begin a shipping business to Santa Fe at reasonable time at $6.00 per hundred pounds."
Okay. Wind Wagon Thomas decided that he could set wagons up with sails and move them across the prairie it wasn't a dumb idea. Eventually, they did get wagons as far west as Colorado. A couple of them were knocked over by tornadoes. They blew off when people were sleeping and were not found again. Some of them looked like the ice fishing boats. These little narrow things that guys would sit on and they -- I don't know what they were carrying, but, boy, you could get to Santa Fe quickly.
The Chinese did that as early as the 1500s. It wasn't a new idea, but what was new is that we had prairies and we had wind. And we had a place to go and a reason to go. It was -- it was made of planks, had four wheels, it has a big -- if any of you have the book you will see a funny, funny picture of it. Wind Wagon gave up when his eventually was picked up by a tornado and dropped. And he just -- he just -- he gave up.
However, some -- some men who worked for the railroad came up with the idea of wind-powered railroad cars. And they have -- they had a patent for it. So I guess these things were floating around probably for about 30 years on the border. They ceased, of course, and the Santa Fe Trail did pretty much with the Civil War. You know, trading down into New Mexico or Mexico, at that point, resulted in a great deal of wealth.
Those of you who have a chance come up and see the Hickman House in Franklin; it was one of the wealthier families. That's one of the few Santa Fe Trail houses. I know there's the Caleb Bingham House out towards Independence, right? And that's a great place to go particularly at Christmas; just absolutely a beautiful place.
You can see a number of sites in Missouri, you know, I would say you start in St. Charles because the Boonslick Trail really came out to Franklin and then picked up the Santa Fe Trail. I've had people say to me the Santa Fe Trail really began in Europe, because eventually they sent there for a great -- for much of their cotton. It was cheaper. And then, of course, it became a whole thing about American manufacture.
And as the more things changed, the more they stayed the same. Lots of things I came across about the Santa Fe Trail in Missouri; the bank panics, businesses failing, people coming with odd ideas. But if nothing else, Missouri has really put their stamp on the trail. I mean, they brought in language. And one of the -- in fact, I know somebody asked me about this and really quickly I'll tell you. Elizabeth Newcum and she's one of our more important people.
1847, a gentleman named Amandus Schnabel was mustered in, you know, joined the enlisted in St. Louis. Along with him was William Newcum who really was Elizabeth Caroline Newcum, a 22-year-old Missouri adventurist. We don't know much about her. We don't know where she came from. Amandus, his father was a doctor in St. Louis. They had emigrated from Germany a few years before he joined the military in 1847.
She went down the Santa Fe Trail with the unit. She was the assistant -- she was assigned to Schnabel's squad. So, of course, the men were in on this. They knew exactly who she was and why she was there, but she did march down the trail. There's a chance she took place in a couple of skirmishes out towards Colorado. By the next year she was pregnant. Amandus, in his really upright fashion, tried to convince her to runaway. She did, she felt guilty, she came back. She was discharged. Eventually, he was court-martial for, I think, it was for denying the United States Army the work of a soldier.
I mean, the fact that she wasn't supposed to be there didn't really count, but we lose sight of him. Elizabeth, however, was sterner. She was made of much sterner material. In 1853, Mrs. Elizabeth Newcum Smith, filed a claim in Platte County for back pay as well as 160 acres of bounty lands due to soldiers who served in the Mexican War. At least, one former soldier testified on her behalf and said, yes, that's Bill Newcum. It took a year. In 1854, Congress passed the special bill and she was awarded not only the bounty land, but money from the military.
So, she was a mother. She was a Missourian. She was a solider and she is one of the first female soldiers to travel the Santa Fe Trail and as far as we know one of the very few women whose names we know from that early era.
So Missourians contributed much to the trail. There are hundreds of stories. And I -- it's been fun and I really hope that I get people coming up to me with even more that I missed, but the trail we all should be very proud of. And it started here.
Well, thank you so much. I appreciate your patience and your interest and you just staying awake.
(Laughter.)
(Applause.)