and lay there during certain weary months.

It was Pike's story of the far Southwest that first started the
idea of the commerce of the Santa Fe Trail. In that day geography
was a human thing, a thing of vital importance to all men. Men
did not read the stock markets; they read stories of adventure,
tales of men returned from lands out yonder in the West.
Heretofore the swarthy Mexicans, folk of the dry plains and hills
around the head of the Rio Grande and the Red, had carried their
cotton goods and many other small and needful things all the way
from Vera Cruz on the seacoast, over trails that were long,
tedious, uncertain, and expensive. A far shorter and more natural
trade route went west along the Arkansas, which would bring the
American goods to the doors of the Spanish settlements. After
Pike and one or two others had returned with reports of the
country, the possibilities of this trade were clear to any one
with the merchant's imagination.

There is rivalry for the title of "Father of the Santa Fe Trail."
As early as 1812, when the United States was at war with England,
a party of men on horseback trading into the West, commonly
called the McKnight, Baird, and Chambers party, made their way
west to Santa Fe. There, however, they met with disaster. All
their goods were confiscated and they themselves lay in Mexican
jails for nine years. Eventually the returning survivors of this
party told their stories, and those stories, far from chilling,
only inflamed the ardor of other adventurous traders. In 1821
more than one American trader reached Santa Fe; and, now that the
Spanish yoke had been thrown off by the Mexicans, the goods,
instead of being confiscated, were purchased eagerly.