The old Santa Fe Trail /
by Stanley Vestal ; introduction by Marc Simmons
- Lincoln, Neb. : University of Nebraska Press, c1996.
- xiii, 304 p. : ill., maps ; 20 cm.
Originally published: Boston : Houghton Mifflin, 1939.
Part I: The prairie ocean -- Windwagon -- Outfitting for the trail -- Preparations for the march -- The trail to Council Grove -- Stampede -- Part II: Council Grove -- The start -- Diamond Springs -- Part III: Grand Arkansas -- Buffalo fever -- Running meat -- Part V: The fork in the trail -- Pawnee Rock -- 'Prairie prison' -- The crossing of the Arkansas. Part V: The desert route -- The Cimarron Desert -- The Canadian River -- Part VI: The mountain route -- Chouteau's Island -- Medicine Horse -- Sand Creek -- Kit Carson's last smoke -- The big timbers -- Little chief -- Bent's old fort -- Part VII: La Fonda -- The end of the trail -- Appendix: Notes -- Chronology of the trail -- Mileage and stops on the Santa Fe Trail -- The commerce of the prairies -- Bibliography.
The Santa Fe Trail was one of the two great overland highways originating in Missouri in the nineteenth century. Several decades before settlers streamed over the Oregon Trail, traders were heading southwest. The caravans carried the wares of Yankee commerce; they returned loaded with buffalo robes and beaver pelts and the rich metals of Mexican mines. The thousand-mile journey "was a perilous cruise across a boundless sea of grass, over forbidding mountains, among wild.; Beasts and wilder men, ending in an exotic city offering quick riches, friendly foreign women, and a moral holiday," writes Stanley Vestal. Vestal begins where the trail does. He describes outfitting for the trip, the society formed for survival, the hunt for meat, landmarks, and the dangers. He evokes the history and legends surrounding the trail at every point, including figures like Kit Carson, Jedediah Smith, the Bent brothers, and Uncle Dick Wooton.