This was the day not of water but of land transport; yet the
wheeled vehicles which passed out into the West as common
carriers of civilization clung to the river valleys--natural
highways and natural resting places of homebuilding man. This has
been the story of the advance of civilization from the first
movements of the world's peoples. The valleys are the cleats of
civilization's golden sluices.

There lay the great valley of the Arkansas, offering food and
water, an easy grade and a direct course reaching out into the
West, even to the edge of the lands of Spain; and here stood
wheeled vehicles able to traverse it and to carry drygoods and
hardware, and especially domestic cotton fabrics, which formed
the great staple of a "Santa Fe assortment." The people of the
Middle West were now, in short, able to feed and clothe
themselves and to offer a little of their surplus merchandise to
some one else in sale. They had begun to export! Out yonder, in a
strange and unknown land, lay one of the original markets of
America!

On the heels of Lewis and Clark, who had just explored the
Missouri River route to the Northwest, Captain Zebulon Pike of
the Army, long before the first wheeled traffic started West, had
employed this valley of the Arkansas in his search for the
southwestern delimitations of the United States. Pike thought he
had found the head of the Red River when after a toilsome and
dangerous march he reached the headwaters of the Rio Grande. But
it was not our river. It belonged to Spain, as he learned to his
sorrow, when he marched all the way to Chihuahua in old Mexico