Whose furthest footsteps never strayed
Beyond the village of his birth,
Is but a lodger for the night
In this old Wayside Inn of Earth.


The broad green prairies of the West roll back in huge billows from the
Missouri bluffs, and ripple gently on, to melt at last into the level
grassy plains sloping away to the foothills of the Rocky Mountains. Up
and down these land-waves, and across these ripples, the old Santa Fé
Trail, the slender pathway of a wilderness-bridging commerce, led out
toward the great Southwest--a thousand weary miles--to end at last,
where the narrow thoroughfare reached the primitive hostelry at the
corner of the plaza in the heart of the capital of a Spanish-Mexican
demesne.

It was a strange old highway, tying the western frontier of a new,
self-reliant American civilization to the eastern limit of an autocratic
European offshoot, grafted upon an ancient Indian stock of the Western
Hemisphere. In language, nationality, social code, political faith, and
prevailing spiritual creed, the terminals of this highway were as
unlike as their geographical naming. For the trail began at
_Independence_, in Missouri, and ended at Santa Fé, the "_City of the
Holy Faith_," in New Mexico.

The little trading town of Independence was a busy place in the frontier
years of the Middle West. Ungentle and unlovely as it was, it was the
great gateway between the river traffic on the one side, and the plains