In August of 1864 the scenery along the route from Kansas City,
Missouri, to Santa Fe, New Mexico, was grand. Kansas City at that time
was a very small place. Its inhabitants may have numbered two or three
thousand. Santa Fe with its narrow streets looking like alleys was built
mostly of doby (mud bricks). Crowded up against the mountains, at the
end of a little valley, through which runs a tributary to the Rio
Grande, boasted of healthful climate. Santa Fe had a public square in
the center, a house known as "the Palace." There were numerous gambling
houses there and these gambling houses were considered as respectable as
the merchants' store houses. The business of the place was considerable,
many of the merchants being wholesale dealers for the vast territory
tributary. In the money market there were no pennies,--nothing less than
five-cent pieces. The old palace about which I have called your
attention is an old land mark of Santa Fe and is to Santa Fe what "The
Alamo" is to Texas. The postoffice at that time was a small building,
14x24, with a partition in the center. It was one-story with a dirt
roof, as were all the houses of that old Spanish city at the time my
narrative opens.

On my first trip from Santa Fe to Kansas City in 1864 there was little
to note except that when I got up on the Raton mountain about thirty
miles from Trinidad, Colorado, Uncle Dick Wooten had a large force of
Mexicans building a toll road. Originally the road was almost
impassable. Saddle horses and pack mules could get over the narrow
rock-ribbed pass and around what was known as the "devil's gate," but it
was next to impossible for the stages and other caravans to get to
Trinidad. This was the natural highway to southwestern Colorado and
northwestern New Mexico. Uncle Dick was a man of considerable
forethought and it occurred to him that he might make some money if he
bought a few pounds of dynamite and blasted the rock at "the Devil's