Mountains, a trade was opened between St. Louis and the old Spanish
settlements at Santa Fe. Although even in the days of Washington
adventurous frontiersmen like George Rogers Clark had set their eyes
on Santa Fe and the silver-mines of the southwest, it was not until
the Mexican revolution (1821), when Spain's control was weakened
throughout her whole domain, that systematic trade was possible. In
1822, Becknell, of Missouri, took a wagon-train to Santa Fe, to
trade for horses and mules and to trap en route. Year after year
thereafter, caravans of Missouri traders found their way across the
desert, by the Santa Fe trail, with cottons and other dry-goods
furnished from St. Louis, and brought back horses, mules, furs, and
silver. The trade averaged about one hundred and thirty thousand
dollars a year, and was an important source of supply of specie for
the west; and it stimulated the interest of St. Louis in the Mexican
provinces. The mode of handling the wagon--trains that passed
between Missouri and Santa Fe furnished the model for the caravans
that later were to cross the plains in the rush to the gold-fields
of California.[Footnote: Gregg, Commerce of the Prairies;
Chittenden, Am. Fur Trade, II., chap. xxix.] By 1833 the important
western routes were clearly made known.[Footnote: Semple, Am. Hist.
and its Geographic Conditions, chap, x.] The Oregon trail, the Santa
Fe trail, the Spanish trail, and the Gila route [Footnote: Personal
Narrative of James O. Pattie; H. H. Bancroft, Hist. of California,
III., 162.] had been followed by frontiersmen into the promised land
of the Pacific coast and the southwest. In the course of ten years,
not only had the principal secrets of the topography of the Rocky
Mountains, the Great Basin, the passes across the Sierra Nevadas
been revealed, but also the characteristics of the Spanish-American
settlements of California and the Rio Grande region. Already
pioneers sought Texas, and American colonization was preparing for