That Broad and Beckoning Highway: The Santa Fe Trail and the Rush for Gold in California and Colorado

Although most 1849 emigrants thought of Santa Fe as their objective on the first leg of the trek to California, it is ironic that a majority of them never saw it. Probably more than 50 percent of the emigrants, or an even great number, chose to turn south on the road to Galisteo, New Mexico, instead of heading into Santa Fe, from the evidence of diaries, journals and letters. Just as computing the total number of gold rush emigrants who took the Santa Fe Trail is impossible, so too we will never know how many ultimately visited Santa Fe. The prime reasons for skipping Santa Fe were – it was not worth the time, the strain on animals or the expense. Plus, it was “out of the way.” Since most emigrants were headed south into the New Mexico and Arizona deserts, it was reasonable to turn south once they were through Glorieta Pass and eventually strike the Rio Grande. To do this, almost all the emigrant parties that did not go into Santa Fe headed down the “Galisteo Road” – that is, about 10 miles east of Santa Fe they went southwest to the village of Galisteo rather than heading northwest to Santa Fe. [This route approximates present-day Highways 285 and 41 from Exit 290 on Interstate 25.] On the other hand, most companies did send a few men into Santa Fe to buy supplies or barter their oxen and mules for pack animals. And some emigrants just wanted to see the city they had heard so much about, the exotic, Mexican city which recently had been conquered and annexed by the United States. But, again, for the majority of emigrants, it was the “Galisteo Road” that they followed and the community of Galisteo where they prepared for their further journey.

Imagine the mind of a gold rush emigrant on reaching Santa Fe – or Santa Fee as many seemed to have pronounced it, given the spelling in their journals and diaries. It was both a destination and a departure point. For six or eight weeks or more they had been looking forward to this fabled town, so recently occupied by American forces, yet they knew that the most rigorous part of their journey was still ahead of them. For the emigrants who went into Santa Fe – and a majority probably turned south to Galisteo and never saw the city – the response they had was almost universal: Santa Fe was the foulest den of iniquity they had ever encountered. They did not care for the architecture, the people, the Catholic religion and churches, the drinking, the gambling, the hotels, and certainly not for the merchants and traders, who seemed to be out to take them for every last dollar they had. Many did comment, as did those who had stopped in Las Vegas, on the presence of American troops and the surge of pride they felt at seeing the American flag flying. These emigrants, then, provide an interesting picture of “The City Different” in 1849 and on into the 1850s. It is not an overstatement to say that the diary or journal of every emigrant who visited Santa Fe had something to say about it. The following four reactions are typical:

Las Vegas, New Mexico, has two business districts – “New Town” on the east side of the Gallinas River, and the “Old Town” Plaza on the west side of the river. Connecting the two is National Avenue, which crosses the Gallinas where the old Santa Fe Trail once forded it. The U. S. Army of the West followed what would become National Avenue when it marched to the Las Vegas Plaza, where General Stephen Watts Kearny declared the American conquest of the Southwest. North of town along the river is Old National Road, which twists and turns and is only partially paved. And leading out of the Las Vegas Plaza, on its southwest corner is South Pacific Avenue, which is the route the Santa Fe Trail took from there to Tecolote, San Miguel, Pecos, and Santa Fe.

These street names can be read as evidence that in the late nineteenth century and on into the twentieth century, the people of Las Vegas, certainly, and in a broader context perhaps, peoples all along the Santa Fe Trail saw the trail as a national highway linking the older American states in the east with the new territories in the west – South Pacific Avenue pointed the way to California.

It was in 1811 that Congress first authorized the construction of the “National Road” from Cumberland, Maryland, over the Appalachian Mountains to Wheeling, West Virginia. In 1820 this “old” National Road was extended, again by act of Congress, to St. Louis. And St. Louis was seen as the “gateway to the west” and to a certain extent the eastern terminus of the Santa Fe Trail. Various land routes connected St. Louis to Independence, Westport and Kansas City. By the 1820s, steamboats carried merchandise up the Missouri, merchandise which would be taken by traders in their wagon caravans to Santa Fe and old Mexico – along the Santa Fe Trail. The Santa Fe Trail has been and still can be regarded as a natural extension of that Old National Road, linking east and west.

As this study has demonstrated, thousands of California gold rush emigrants chose the Santa Fe Trail as their route to the Pacific. For them, the Santa Fe Trail was the road to El Dorado – it was well-known, well-beaten, and well-traveled. It was the highway to the new American possessions gained in war with Mexico, including California. The emigrant experience of the trail was short-lived, from 1849 into the early 1850s, but it served the emigrants well. And they experienced the Santa Fe Trail in new and varying ways that differed from its traditional use by traders and U. S. Army contingents. They provide a fresh perspective on the people, places, and experiences of the trail, and even on the road itself – that broad and easy highway to their dreams.

There are four areas of emphasis through which this story of emigrants on the Santa Fe Trail in the California gold rush can enhance our contemporary understanding of the trail and change our perceptions of its history and heritage. These areas include:

1. 
   The Santa Fe Trail as an emigrant trail, not just a commercial or military highway.
   
2. 
   The importance of certain places on the trail, some familiar to all travelers of the day, but others not, which gained significance for emigrants in particular and today should be acknowledged as such.
   
3. 
   The unique interaction of the emigrants with the peoples of the plains and the Southwest, both Native groups and the Mexican population – the newly annexed “Americans” of New Mexico. Their experiences provide fresh insights into the general cultural opinions of Anglo-Americans in the mid-19^th century with regard to American Indians and Mexicans. Also, the emigrants’ comments and observations in their diaries, letters and journals contribute to a better comprehension of the events that will unfold on the plains in the 1850s and 1860s and the evolution of the multicultural society that will emerge in New Mexico over the next decades.
   
4. 
   The view, by the late 1840s, of the Santa Fe Trail as a major highway with many branches or “feeder” trails. There was a general knowledge, regardless of from where an emigrant party started or how it proceeded that, even if they were not on the main route of the Santa Fe Trail – it lay somewhere to the north or south of them and was accessible with a few days’ or weeks’ travel. It would lead them west.
   

The Santa Fe Trail historically has been regarded first and foremost as a commercial link between the American frontier and the Spanish/Mexican southwest, and rightly so. After 1846 and the American conquest and annexation of the Southwest it also became the route by which the United States Army maintained its presence in this new territory, both for troop movements and the freighting of provisions for dozens of army posts. The trail has not been seen as an emigrant trail, certainly not on the scale of the Oregon-California Trail, following the Platte River west. This perception can and should be somewhat revised, given the evidence of the use of the Santa Fe Trail by California gold seekers from 1849 on into the 1850s. Admittedly, tens of thousands more “’49ers” used the Platte River Road, but the emigration on the Santa Fe Trail and its variants such as the Cherokee Trail and the Fort Smith-Santa Fe Road was not insignificant. Also, in this instance it was the Santa Fe Trail which fed into the major routes across the New Mexico and Arizona deserts, such as the Gila Trail. And again, admittedly, the Santa Fe Trail was never an important route for Americans seeking to move westward and settle, primarily as farmers in a new land, as with the Oregon-California Trail.

As indicated several times in this study, assessing the number of California-bound emigrants who followed the Santa Fe, Cherokee, and Fort Smith trails is impossible, though estimates have been made. Certainly from 1849 to the mid-1850s, total emigration to California from all points of the globe reached well over 100,000 and perhaps even approached 200,000. Merrill Mattes in his thorough study of emigration on The Great Platte River Road places the number just for that route between 1849 and 1855 at 180,000. Patricia Etter, noted historian of the American West, has conducted the most substantive research into the use of southern trails to California, especially in her To California on the Southern Route 1849: A History and Annotated Bibliography, which has been referenced liberally in this study. She is cautious, placing the number of emigrants on these routes, including the Santa Fe Trail and the Fort Smith-Santa Fe Road, in the “thousands” in 1849. Elliott West, author of The Contested Plains: Indians, Goldseekers, and the Rush To Colorado, writing the “Foreword” to Etter’s To California asserts that “at least 20,000 persons rushed to California in 1849 by another way. . . .” – that is, other than by the Platte River Road. Etter provides one further estimation in her edition of “The 1849 Diary of Stanislaus Lasselle,” where she writes, “The majority of emigrants coming out of Santa Fe had wagons and followed the Southern Trail, which left the Rio Grande near present Hatch, New Mexico. Travelers coming from Texas and Mexico also funneled into this trail. It headed in a southwesterly direction toward Guadalupe Pass just north of the international boundary and east of the Arizona-New Mexico border, continued to Santa Cruz, Sonora, then turned north by way of Tucson and the villages of the Pima Indians. At this point it joined the Gila Trail. Well over 15,000 emigrants moved over these trails toward the Yuma crossing in 1849.” After 1849 emigrant traffic on all these routes, whether from Missouri via the Santa Fe Trail or from Fort Smith or Grand Saline [Oklahoma] and then across the southwest, diminished rapidly. (Mattes 23; Etter 8; 25; Lasselle 4)

Historians of the Santa Fe Trail have almost uniformly ignored or overlooked the role of the trail in the California gold rush. The one exception is Louise Barry in The Beginning of the West, her exhaustive and supremely valuable catalogue of the people, events, and developments connected with Kansas as “the gateway to the American West” from 1540 to 1854. Her entries for the years 1848 to 1854 include numerous notices of gold rush related items. Her indexing of the major regional newspapers is especially valuable, saving a researcher countless hours, even in this age of online access to historical newspapers.

A few examples of general histories of the Santa Fe Trail will suffice to demonstrate the lack of attention granted California-bound emigrants on the trail. Henry Inman in his The Old Santa Fé Trail [1899] has just three sentences on the gold rush, though he does acknowledge that “thousands of men and their families crossed the plains and the Rocky Mountains, seeking their fortunes in the new El Dorado.” Robert Duffus, whose The Santa Fe Trail [1934] is one of the more lyrical and readable general trail histories, devotes three paragraphs to the 1849 emigration. He mainly speculates on the impact of the emigration on the city of Santa Fe itself, rather than discussing the use of the trail. Interestingly, he reviews use of the trails southwest from Santa Fe, even mentioning that “no less than 8000 are said to have gone this way [from Santa Fe],” though without verification. Stanley Vestal [The Old Santa Fe Trail – 1939] and Hobart Stocking [The Road to Santa Fe – 1971] merely nod toward the gold rush emigration, dismissing it in a few sentences. Even William Brown in his ground-breaking The Santa Fe Trail: National Park Service 1963 Sites Survey includes only one paragraph lumping together the 1849 and 1859 gold rushes. He claims that, “between April and September 1849 about 2,500 emigrants from at least ten states went to California via the Santa Fe Trail,” but he cites no source for this estimate. It would seem that the general history of the role of the Santa Fe Trail in the California gold rush has yet to be appreciated and written. (Inman 145; Duffus 225; William Brown 58)

Sites on the Trail in 1849 of Special Interest or Importance to Emigrants

While many emigrants faithfully recorded the names and locations of hundreds of natural features, creek crossings, campgrounds and other places along the trail – sometimes using well-known names, at other times inventing their own – of the ten sites listed and describe previously in this study there are four sites that were mentioned frequently, figured importantly in emigrant travel calculations and progress, and have not to date been recognized nor interpreted in this light. These four are: Running Turkey Creek; Bent’s Old Fort; San Miguel, New Mexico, and vicinity; and the “Galisteo Fork,” the branching of a trail from the main route into Santa Fe, west of Glorieta Pass, down to Galisteo, New Mexico. These locales are considered extensively elsewhere in this study. Here they will be reviewed briefly along with an assessment of the current interpretations of the sites.