USA > Kansas > A standard history of Kansas and Kansans, Volume I > Part 17
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The descriptions found in these school books, or those they were de signed to accompany, never failed to compare "The Great American Desert" with the "Great Sahara" of Africa, as witness this from the Elements of Geography, by Benjamin Workman, A. M., Philadelphia, 1814 :
"West of the Mississippi, and south of the Missouri, there is a vast extent of untimbered country, of a barren sandy soil, which has some resemblance to the deserts of Africa."
In A System of Modern Geography for Schools, Academies and Fam- ilies, by Nathaniel G. Huntington, A. M., Hartford, 1836, there is an account of the "Missouri Territory" a part of which is as follows :
"This territory is a vast wilderness, resembling a desert, extending from the state of Missouri and the river Mississippi, to the Rocky Moun- tains. It is a region of open elevated plains, generally destitute of forest trees, and interspersed with barren hills.
"It is inhabited almost exclusively by various tribes of Indians, and traversed by herds of wild horses and buffaloes, which in some instances range by thousands in a drove, appearing almost to eover the face of the ground."
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There is an important map, as pertaining to this subject, in the His- tory of American Missions to the Heathen from their Commencement to the Present Time, Worcester, Spooner & Howland, 1840. Upon that map there is drawn a line marking the "Western Boundary of Habitable Land." That line passes through what is now Kansas a little west of Wichita. It may be reasonably coneluded that the author of the map supposed the line to represent the east boundary of "The Great Amer- iean Desert."
In some of the books published in the period of "The Great American Desert" there were pietured earavans erossing the deserts in much the same fashion that travelers were represented on the African deserts, ex- cept that there is an absence of camels. And even this feature might have been added. In 1857 the general Government bought a number of camels to be used on the deserts of Arizona and California, and their em- ployment there was only prevented by the coming of the Civil War. It is said that these desert animals were abandoned, but lived and inereased in a wild state, becoming in some parts of the Southwest a common nuisanee.
It is interesting to note the persistency of the idea that the country known as the Great Plains was a sandy desert. And it is curious to observe the ignorance of the West remaining in the Eastern States to this day. In 1867 some capitalists there were offered some very valuable mining property in Colorado. Colorado? Was there such a country ! Not a dollar would they venture until a mining expert should be sent to investigate. Mr. A. W. Hoyt was dispatched on that business, and one in- junetion laid upon him was to ascertain for a certainty if there was in fact any such place as Colorado Territory, And he reported to his em- ployers on that country, affirming that it existed, and saying that "The Great American Desert" was almost impassable to man or beast. And in 1878 Rev. Henry Ward Beecher wrote of "riding night and day across the great desert plains."
Even good old Ilorace Greeley, always a friend of Kansas, wrote a chapter on "The American Desert." He made a tour of the West in the summer of 1859. The inhabited districts of Kansas he found attractive enough. But when these were passed he wrote a memorandum of the diminishing comforts of life for the patrons of his Tribune, as follows :
I believe I have now descended the ladder of artificial life nearly to its lowest round. If the Cheyennes thirty of whom stopped the last express down on the route we must traverse, and tried to beg or steal from it shall see fit to capture and strip us, we shall probably have further experience in the same line: but for the present the progress } have made during the last fortnight toward the primitive simplicity of human existence may be roughly noted thus :
May 12th .- Chicago .- Chocolate and morning newspaper last seen on the breakfast-table.
23d .- Leavenworth. - Room-bells and baths make their final appear anee.
24th .- Topeka .- Beef-steak and wash-bowls other than tin' last vis- ible. Barber ditto.
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26th .- Manhattan .- Potatoes and eggs last recognized among the blessings that "brighten as they take their flight." Chairs ditto.
27th .- Junction City .- Last visitation of a boot-blaek, with dissolving views of a board bedroom. Beds bid us good-by.
28th .- Pipe Creek .- Benches for seats at meals have disappeared, giving place to bags and boxes. We (two passengers of a scribbling turn) write our letters in the express-wagon that has borne us by day, and must supply us lodgings for the night.
The depths of desolation were not experienced until his arrival on the upper reaches of the Republican. On the 2d of June he penned a com- munication from Station 18, P. P. Express Company, in which he said :
The elouds which threatened rain at the station on Prairie-Dog Creek, whenee I wrote two days ago, were dissipated by a violent gale, which threatened to overturn the heavy wagon in which my fellow-passengers and I were courting sleep-had it stood broadside to the wind, it must have gone over. It is customary, I learn, to stake down the wagons eneamped on the open prairie; in the valleys of the ereeks, where the company's stations are located, this precaution is deemed superfluous. But the winds which sweep the high prairies of this region are terrible ; and the few trees that grow thinly along the ereek-bottoms rarely venture to raise their heads above the adjacent bluffs, to which they owe their doubtful hold on existenee.
For more than a hundred miles baek, the soil has been steadily degen- erating, until here, where we strike the Republican, which has been far to the north of us sinee we left it at Fort Riley, three hundred miles baek, we seem to have reached the aeme of barrenness and desolation. We left this morning, Station 17, on a little ereek entitled Gouler, at least thirty miles baek, and did not see a tree, and but one bunch of low shrubs in a dry water-course throughout our dreary morning ride, till we eame in sight of the Republican, which has a little-a very little-serubby eotton-wood nestled in and along its bluffs just here-but there is none beside for miles, save a little lurking in a ravine which makes down to the river from the north. Of grass there is little, and that little of miserable quality-either a seanty, furze or coarse alkaline sort of rush, less fit for food than physie. Soil there is none but an inch or so of intermittent grass-root tangle, based on what usually seems to be a thin stratum of clay, often washed off so as to leave nothing but a slightly argillaceous sand. Along the larger water-courses-this one especially- this sand seems to be as pure as Sahara ean boast.
The dearth of water is fearful. Although the whole region is deeply seamed and gullied by water-courses-now dry, but in rainy weather mill-streams-no springs burst from their steep sides. We have not passed a drop of living water in all our morning's ride, and but a few pailfuls of muddy moisture at the bottoms of a very few of the fast- drying slonghs or sunken holes in the beds of dried-up ereeks. Yet there has been much rain here this season, some of it not long ago. But this is a region of sterility and thirst. If utterly unfed, the grass of a season would hardly suffice, when dry, to nourish a prairie-fire.
Even the animals have deserted us. No buffalo have been seen this year within many miles of ns. though their old paths lead occasionally aeross this country ; I presume they pass rapidly through it, as I should urgently advise them to do; not a gray-wolf has honored us with his company to-day-he prefers to live where there is something to eat- the prairie-dog also wisely shuns this land of starvation; no animal but gopher (a little ereature, between a mouse and a ground-squirrel)
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abounds here; and Ire burrows deep in the sand and picks up a living, I cannot guess how ; while a few hawks and an occasional prairie-wolf (eayota) lives by picking here and there a gopher. They must find him disgustingly lean.
I would match this station and its surroundings against any other scene on our continent for desolation. From the high prairie over which we approach it, you overlook a grand sweep of treeless desert, through the middle of which flows the Republican, usually in several shallow streams separated by sand-bars or islets-its whole volume being far less than that of the Mohawk at Utica, though it has drained above this point an area equal to that of Connecticut. Of the few serubby cotton- woods lately cowering under the bluffs at this point, most have been eut for the uses of the station, though logs for its embryo house are drawn from a little clump, eight miles distant. A broad bed of sand indieated that the volume of water is sometimes a hundred-fold its present amount, though it will doubtless soon be far less than it now is. Its average depth cannot now exceed six inches. On every hand, and for many miles above and below, the country above the bluffs is such as we have passed over this morning. A dead mule-bitten in the jaw this morning by a rattlesnake-lies here as if to complete the scene. Off the five weeks old track to Pike's Peak, all is dreary solitude and silence.
The Cimarron runs through the southwest corner of Kansas. Max Greene explored in that region at an early date, and here is the account he wrote of that stream in his The Kansas Region.
Toward the rising sun swells out the easternmost barrier of the Rocky Mountains, the long-extending Ratone, with its portieos of col- umnar quartz leading to kiosks of slumbrous eedar, by whose springs the dust-stained pilgrim rests and has sweet thoughts of home and friends afar. Ilere, from the cool embrasures, a yellow and scorehed eternity of plain meets the view. So flat is it, you may wander, day after day, without onee meeting an elevation perceptibly overtopping the rnde mound which marks the emigrant's grave, until, at last, lured on by the vapory trieks of the mirage, you stand where that desert moekery of a river, the Cimarron, seams the dead, unsmiling level. You look down into that soundless stream of crystal air, and strange, solemn emotions thrill you, as though you trod with regal Ulysses his shadowy glens beneath the low-eaved sky of Cimmeria. You descend the bank and walk the bottom of a sunken river. Miles away, on either side, are the bluffs of projecting nodules of clay, wearing the black and fallen look of deserted forts, and here and there are inlets of dry arroyos pouring in their lesser currents of nothing, A dread of demonry comes over you. and you stagger on like a siek man in a dream. The limber serpent glides from your path. You pause where the acrid fountlet bubbles up and sinks back again beneath the shadow of the silver-margined euphorbia-the one beautiful flower on the bosom of desolation. Thus sifts the broad and deep but viewless Cimarron through quicksands, or gathers in lakes of sunless caverns down where eyeless gnomes hold vigil in the center of the earth, anear the iron-pillared throne of cloudy and formless Demogorgon. If there be a vein of supernaturalism in you, the voieeless appealing of these wizard regions will bring it to the surface of your nature.
In 1836 Irving wrote his Astoria. Ile had something to say of the "Great American Desert." It is quoted here to show how extensive the idea of that mythical land was down to that time:
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Such is the nature of this immense wilderness of the far west ; which apparently defies cultivation, and the habitation of civilized life. Some portions of it along the rivers may partially be subdued by agriculture. others may form vast pastoral tracts, like those of the east; but it is to be feared that a great part of it will form a lawless interval between the abodes of civilized man, like the wastes of the ocean or the deserts of Arabia; and, like them be subject to the depredations of the marauder. Here may spring up new and mongrel races, like new formations in geology, the amalgamation of the "debris" and "abrasions" of former races, eivilized and savage; the remains of broken and almost extin- guished tribes; the descendants of wandering hunters and trappers; of fugitives from the Spanish and American frontiers; of adventurers and desperadoes of every class and country ; yearly ejected from the bosom of society into the wilderness. We are contributing incessantly to swell this singular and heterogeneous cloud of wild population that is to hang about our frontier, by the transfer of whole tribes of savages from the east of the Mississippi to the great wastes of the far west. Many of these bear with them the smart of real or faneied injuries; many consider themselves expatriated beings, wrongfully exiled from their hereditary homes, and the sepulehres of their fathers, and cherish a deep and abiding animosity against the race that has dispossessed them. Some may gradu- ally become pastoral hordes, like those rude and migratory people, half shepard, half warrior, who, with their flocks and herds, roam the plains of upper Asia, but, other, it is to be apprehended, will become predatory bands, mounted on the fleet steeds of the prairies, with the open plains for their marauding grounds, and the mountains for their retreats and lurking places. Here they may resemble those great hordes of the north : "Gog and Magog with their bands" that haunted the gloomy imagina- tions of the prophets. "A great company and a mighty host, all riding upon horses, and warring upon those nations which were at rest. and dwelt peaceably, and had gotten cattle and goods."
It was but the lack of truth about the portions of Kansas set down as a part of "The Great American Desert" which caused the errors to be spread broadcast. If the faets eould have been known the geographers would have put the desert districts back of the Rocky Mountains where they may still be found. The two great divisions of Kansas, as applied to natural productions, are well defined. They are separate, one from the other, and entirely unlike in physical aspeet. They are the Prairies and the Great Plains. The Prairies extend from the Missouri border to an irregular line passing through Couneil Grove. It is one of the fairest regions of the world. It is a rolling country and well watered. The streams are fringed with fine trees-oak, hiekory, walnut, hackberry. cottonwood, and willow. There is no more pleasing landscape than a view from any elevation in the Prairie regions will reveal. For some thousands of years, at least, the Prairies have been grass-clad, well watered, and fertile. They never possessed in historie times any of the characteristics of the desert.
The Great Plains extended from the western borders of the Prairies about Couneil Grove to the Rocky Mountains. And those elevated passes west of Laramie might be included. That was a country of frayed out. and disappearing streams. There was little or no timber. Stretches of drifting sand were to be found, but these were not deserts in the true
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sense. The country was almost all covered with buffalo grass-perhaps the most nutritious of all grasses. It was short-an inch or two in height-and as thick as the wool on the buffalo. Along the larger streams other grasses were found, some of them coarse and tall. In the country drained by the Arkansas there were diminutive oaks-known to the ex- plorers as Shin-oaks-two or three feet in height, but often prone upon the earth, and having abundant crops of acorns. There were plum bushes of the same dimensions, often loaded with fruit. They were called sand- plums, or buffalo plums, and were relished by the followers of Coronado and all travelers over the Plains since. The Great Plains were the pas- tures, par excellence, of the buffalo. In no other region were they ever found in such numbers. The antelope was also native to the Great Plains. When the wild horse appeared these Plains became his favorite haunts. The deer, the wolf, the coyote, the rabbit, and numerous birds were to be found on the Great Plains. So, even there the characteristics of the desert were entirely wanting.
There was a Great American Desert. It exists to this hour, but the enterprise of the American will reclaim most of it and make it fruitful. It never did exist in the territory composing Kansas. The mistake of the early geographers was in placing the Great American Desert on the Great Plains. But this mistake is turned to advantage by the enterprising Kansas man. It is the delight of his life to write accounts of the enor- mous crops now produced "on land which two generations since was a part of the Great American Desert." His figures in this respect are truly astonishing-but they are, strange as it would seem, only facts capable of demonstration to all.
And, as in all other things, the myth of the Great American Desert is an asset of no mean proportion to the Kansas man. All of which serves to establish, in a way, the boast that what is a calamity for other countries is often a valuable asset for Kansas. It is not true of any other state. It is possible only of-
"Sunny Kansas, with her woes and glory."
CHAPTER VIII
THE SANTA FE TRAIL
The Santa Fe Trail was one of those natural routes sometimes found between countries far separated. The physical conformation of the Southwest made this road a commercial highway. Over its course-at least, over courses approximating its final location-savage tribes had migrated and warred and traded for many generations before America was discovered. It could not be otherwise. For some definite way was necessary from the mouth of the Kansas River across the Prairies, and Great Plains to the depressions in the mountain systems of Western North America. The breaking down of these mountain chains produced the arid lands and desert regions found in New Mexico, Arizona, and California. To the southward the Great Plains emerged into those eoun- tries and the El Llano Estacado, or Staked Plain, of the Panhandle of Texas.
In the evolution of the human race man passed through his varions periods of development in ways now seen to have constituted nature itself. Fish was his first artificial food-for it had to be cooked to become fully available. And it is probable that man first utilized fire when he turned to this food. To procure fish for food, man, in the Middle Status of Savagery. followed the shores and streams of the world and spread over the whole earth. So streams were the first routes of continental or inland travel coursed by man. Certain points of departure from one stream to another became recognized as having superior advantages. This supe- riority of locations seems also to have been natural to the intuition of animals, for they well knew the easy grades and the fords and best eross- ing-places. They, in common with man, sought the most natural ways from stream to stream, and the lowest gaps and depressions through the mountains and over the countries which constituted their habitats and ranges. In some lands rivers beeame saered-some instances of which remain to this day. In those primal days the Missonri River, in common with others, was, no doubt, traversed by primitive man. He ascended it -deseended it. He dwelt on its shores for generations and ages. As he inereased in mental power and in numbers other sources of food-supply developed. In pursuit of these he began to explore and travel from its shores. As his geographieal knowledge was increased and his own powers were augmented, intercourse with other tribes began. The point on the Missouri River from which the country we call the Southwest was most
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easily reached was the mouth of the Kansas. There the Missouri makes its great turn, the big bend, and strikes eastward to meet the Mississippi. It is the nearest point made by the Missouri to the Prairies and Great Plains. In fact, the Prairies there touch it for the first time in its aseent. From that point the trails departed, and to that point they converged. Coming out from the depressions in the continental mountain ranges of the West, the Missouri was first and most easily reached at the mouth of the Kansas River. These causes combined to make and establish that aneient continental way which the white man eame to eall the Santa Fe Trail. It was a highway, old and well-trod, when Coronado passed down it upon his return from Quivira.
The Spaniards, on their various expeditions into and over the Great Plains, always traveled portions of the Trail. The first Americans to fol- low it were the pioneer hunters and trappers. The French traders, no doubt, transported goods for Indian barter over the Trail when individual effort represented the extent of the commerce of the Great Plains. Pike followed it up the Arkansas, and Long followed it down the same stream.
The Santa Fe Trail, in the days of its greatest fame, extended from Independence, Missouri, to Santa Fe, the capital eity or seat of Govern- ment of the province of New Mexico. Between these points there were practically no settlements of white people, and, indeed, few permanent. Indian towns. The City of Santa Fe was founded about 1610, the exact date being unknown. It is in the valley of a small stream which flows westward into the Rio Grande, some sixteen miles away. It was not laid out on any definite plan, the streets of the old town straggling to all quarters. In the prosperous days of the Santa Fe trade, it contained about three thousand inhabitants. The houses were constructed of adobe, and as they glimmered in the desert sun, they appeared to be but so many briek kilns. For the site was treeless, and dust and sand were whirled up there in clouds with every breeze. There is some vague Indian tradition that in prehistorie times there was an Indian pueblo on the site of Santa Fe. The background and setting of the town are incomparable. Bold mountains rise almost to the regions of perpetual snow, and the climate is said to be as near perfection as any in America. Under direction of the Americans, it has become a modern and enterprising eity-just as New Mexico has become a prosperous and progressive commonwealth.
Under both Spanish and Mexican rule the province of New Mexico contained a population low in the seale of human intelligence. That this deplorable condition was justly chargeable to the Government goes with- ont saying. Travelers tell us that the people were below the native In- dians in virtue and morality. They were priest-ridden, and buried in the grossest ignorance and superstition. The priests were first in vice. They fixed the fees for performing the ceremony of marriage at such an ex- horbitant sum that few could pay them, foreing most families to rest on voluntary and criminal connexions outside the pale of both the Church and the law. There was, in fact, no law, as Americans understand that term. In theory there was a reversion to aneient Latin Statutes, but no
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one knew what these were, nor cared. There were the rudest elements of a corrupt administration of indistinct legal customs modified by degeneracy since their importation from Spain two centuries before. Corruption pervaded the public service, and ingenious rascality often won for a man a position of consequence.
In trade with Northern Mexico, however, all the weakness and ineffi- ciency did not lie on one side. Historians of the trade are agreed on one point-that the American consular and diplomatic service in Mexico was the most servile ever maintained by any nation. It was a disgrace. The murder of many American citizens resulted from it, and other Americans who were so unfortunate as to be under the necessity of availing them- selves of its so-called aid were humiliated beyond expression and were unable to have any attention whatever given to their affairs. The course of our Government, in this respect, was not lost upon the people of Mexico. They soon learned that American citizens might be robbed and outraged with impunity. Very rarely could an American official in Mexico be induced to give even the least attention to any effort at redress of the grossest indignities heaped upon American citizens transacting bus- iness there. Our country was held in the most supreme contempt by the Government and people of Mexico-and justly so. Our diplomatic standing there was regarded as about on a level with that of San Domingo. And the American traders overland with Northern Mexico had the full benefit of this miserable policy.
No complete history of the Santa Fe trade and trail can be attempted in this work. But a brief review of some of the most important transac- tions of both will be given.
When the Spaniards owned Louisiana they had some thought of developing the overland trade between New Mexico and that province. In May. 1792. one Pedre Vial was sent from Santa Fe to Governor Caron at St. Louis to open communications for that purpose. He was in- structed to keep a daily account of his journey, and to note carefully his course. He was given two Pecos Indians for companions, and four horses to transport baggage. He went by the way of Pecos, and from thence to the Canadian-known to him as Colorado River-Red River. Ile intended to reach the "Nepeste River, which we call in French the Arkansas River." The Arkansas was reached on the 27th of May at a point in the great bend, for the stream flowed "east northeast." On the 20th they fell in with a party of Kansas Indians and were in danger of losing their lives. They were made captive and taken to the Kansas town, on the Kansas River. There they remained until the 16th of September. when they departed in a pirogue with three French traders going to St. Louis, where they arrived on the 6th of October. It does not appear that this effort to open communications overland between the two Spanish provinces bore fruit. No doenment has been found giving further ac- emint of it.
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