Pike thought he
had found the head of the Red River when after a toilsome and
dangerous march he reached the headwaters of the Rio Grande. But
it was not our river. It belonged to Spain, as he learned to his
sorrow, when he marched all the way to Chihuahua in old Mexico
and lay there during certain weary months.
It was Pike's story of the far Southwest that first started the
idea of the commerce of the Santa Fe Trail. In that day geography
was a human thing, a thing of vital importance to all men. Men
did not read the stock markets; they read stories of adventure,
tales of men returned from lands out yonder in the West.
Heretofore the swarthy Mexicans, folk of the dry plains and hills
around the head of the Rio Grande and the Red, had carried their
cotton goods and many other small and needful things all the way
from Vera Cruz on the seacoast, over trails that were long,
tedious, uncertain, and expensive. A far shorter and more natural
trade route went west along the Arkansas, which would bring the
American goods to the doors of the Spanish settlements. After
Pike and one or two others had returned with reports of the
country, the possibilities of this trade were clear to any one
with the merchant's imagination.
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