Before other French traders could take advantage of this ruling, the Treaty of Paris in 1763 changed the whole situation. The French surrendered the eastern half of Louisiana to Great Britain, and ceded all their holdings west of the Mississippi to Spain in payment of an old debt, thus giving Spain almost all of the buffalo of North America in addition to a great deal of land.
Twenty-three years later the governor at Santa Fe signed a treaty with the Comanche tribe, which removed the most serious threat to peaceful travel by outsiders across the southern plains and opened up the possibility that Santa Fe might secure a shorter, better route to the outside world. Since the founding of the colony, the only route had been south into Mexico over 2,000 miles of mountains and deserts. A trade route to St. Louis would be only half as long, and over much more favorable terrain. It could also serve as a trade route to the buffalo hunters on the southern Great Plains.
As a first step in establishing the route, the governor sent a party of three men across to St. Louis to open communications with the Spanish officials there. The three were captured by the Kansas Indians, but were released to French traders on the Missouri. Then troubles at the Spanish court and more wars in Europe prevented any further activities along the trail for several years. Before the officials at Santa Fe could resume the matter, St. Louis had been turned over to the Americans, and the first traders had begun to open the route to Santa Fe. As soon as the United States took possession of St. Louis in 1804, Batiste LaLond went west through the Pawnee villages and on up the Platte Valley to the Rockies, then south to Santa Fe. He settled there instead of returning to St. Louis.
Surprise and excitement gripped the Pawnee villages two years later. The Spanish, to offset the American activities out of St. Louis, sent an expedition to march through the buffalo country and visit some of the important Indian tribes there. They marched into the Pawnee country, a column of 600 Spanish soldiers, colors flying in the breeze and weapons gleaming in the sun, 600 baggage mules, and 1,200 spare horses, all under the command of Don Facundo Malgares. He had orders to hold a grand council with the Pawnees and to impress on them the wealth and might of Spain and the desirability of friendly relations with the Spanish.
This expedition had resulted directly from Spanish uneasiness over the purchase of French Louisiana by the United States. For forty years while the whole southern plains country was claimed by Spain there had been little incentive to establish a definite boundary between New Mexico and Louisiana, but with the Americans encroaching onto the plains, such a line was needed. Spanish interest in the boundary waned as a new Napoleonic War engulfed the country, and the matter went unsettled until Spain and the United States signed the treaty of 1819, one clause of which established the exact boundary.
The Pawness were duly impressed by Don Malgares and his army. They held the council meeting and professed friendship toward the Spanish. Don Malgare then marched back into the southwest, banners flying as he made his way through the vast buffalo herds on his way to New Mexico.
A few days later an American detachment came up the Kansas River to the same Pawnee villages. Lieutenant Zebulon K. Pike had finished his exploration of the upper Mississippi rather quickly and was now on his way west to the Colorado Rockies. Part of his task was to determine the possibilities of navigation on the Kansas, Arkansas, and Red rivers. He had a party of twenty-three whites and fifty-one Indians in a number of small boats, all his men being equipped for work rather than for show, so both in splendor and in numbers he made a poor showing in comparison with the resplendent Don Malgares. The contrast between the Spanish and American forces gave the Pawnees the conviction, which was an accurate one at that time, that Spain was the wealthier and more powerful nation.
Pike soon discovered that he could not go up the Kansas River by boat, so he bought horses from the Pawnees and proceeded overland, his men riding and his camp equipment and supplies carried by pack train, a common method of travel in the buffalo country for years to come. His men ate fresh buffalo meat as they moved west, and reached the Rockies without undue hardship. Pike was captured in the mountains by a Spanish patrol from Santa Fe. He was taken to Mexico, then later sent home by ship.
Pike's arrest seems to have deterred the traders from St. Louis for a time from attempting to open trade with Santa Fe. Then in 1812 twelve traders made the crossing with a pack train of goods, only to have everything confiscated and themselves imprisoned. In 1814 a party of trappers crossed the Rockies to the Spanish settlement at Taos and were well received. They sought permission from the governor at Santa Fe to trap in the colony, but he could not legally grant it without approval from Mexico City. When the trappers returned two years later, they found a new governor, who ordered them out of the country and had them arrested and imprisoned when their departure was delayed by a storm.
The severity of the Spanish officials is better understood when we realize that they were acting strictly according to Spanish law and that it was their duty to keep the Americans out. They had some border troubles too, from attacks by hostile Indians accompanied by American trappers. A war party of Pawnees was intercepted and defeated on the northwestern border of New Mexico in 1819, and an American with the band was captured.
The American traders wanted the governors to ignore the laws so that they could make more profit. They were all pleased, then, when Mexico became independent of Spain in 1821 and many of the restrictive laws were repealed. The new government welcomed American traders to Santa Fe and Taos. In a short time trading parties were on their way, not only for profit, but also to secure the release of friends and relatives imprisoned earlier by the Spanish. They were successful in both instances.
The resulting travel was through the very heart of the southern plains buffalo country, where the herds at times were so huge that the travelers estimated them in the millions. The assured presence of buffalo at several points along the trail enabled the travelers to plan with some certainty; they knew they would have fresh buffalo meat for a good deal of the journey and did not need to stock up heavily on food reserves from the settlements. The extra space could be used for more goods to be sold at a profit.
The first successful trading expedition to Santa Fe was organized in 1821 by William Becknell of Missouri. He took seventy men and a pack train of goods out that year, returning the next spring with a substantial profit. Several other groups were then organized, some of them strictly for trade, others for some trapping in the mountains before going on to Taos, which over the next thirty years attracted a large number of the mountain men.
Becknell decided after surveying the trail on his first trip that wagons could be used to advantage on the route, so in the spring of 1822 he tried the experiment with twenty-one men and three loaded wagons. He had very little trouble on the way. The first 500 miles was across the gently rolling plains. Josiah Gregg stated later, ''The route, indeed, appears to have presented fewer obstacles than an ordinary road of equal length in the United States."
Although the surface of the trail offered little difficulty, any breakdown of a wagon along the way could cause serious trouble, for there was no timber near the roadside to provide a new axle or new reach. To ensure against a delay from a broken axle, many of the wagon drivers cut suitable hardwood logs at Council Grove, 150 miles west of Independence, Missouri, the last good timber along the route. A log was lashed to the underside of each wagon against the time of need. Some of the logs went unused, and were hauled to Santa Fe and back again, to make the trip another year.