Santa Fe Trail - Economics

Economics

The Santa Fe Trail was established in 1821 to take advantage of new trade opportunities with Mexico which had just won independence from Spain in the Mexican War of Independence. The trail was used to haul manufactured goods from the state of Missouri in the United States to Santa Fe which was in the northern Mexican state of Nuevo, Mexico.

The wagon trains that followed various emigrant trails to points west as people responded to opportunity to hold free land, and the political philosophy of Manifest Destiny dominated national political discussions. Connecting the riverboat port cities and their wagon train outfitters to the destinations, the Trail was a fundamentally important trade route, carrying manufactured products from the central plains of United States (Most regularly, present day the Kansas City area, but wagon trails also connected farther north to the trail head towns St. Joseph and Independence, Missouri, which would link to the developing railroads, to points east) to the northeastern ranching and farming country of Mexico, and after the Mexican–American War in 1845 the American Southwest. In the 1820s–30s, it was also sporadically important in the reverse trade, carrying foods and supplies to the fur trappers and mountain men opening the remote Northwest, esp. in the Interior Northwest: Idaho, Wyoming, Colorado, and Montana—connecting via mule trail (trapper's trails) to points north to supply the lucrative overland fur trade.

North–South trade

This limited trade traffic transited the site that would become Fort Bent in Colorado (directly on the Santa Fe Trail) and the short-lived trading fort (Name, owner, management, dates all uncertain) that sat astride the Trapper's Trail and Oregon Trail junction point. This post was only eight miles east of the site of Fort John (now Ft. Laramie) (ca. 1833) on what became the Oregon Trail (1832–34). The lost fort was on the same site where Fort Bernard was later founded (1866) in the eastern Oregon Country (Wyoming). That Fort Bernard ran cargo mule trains to the Santa Fe is historically certain. The earlier Fort and its traders are less so, and that gives weight that they might have been independents, and not employees of the large fur companies. Regardless of the lack of explicit documents, it is known the light trading with Mexico used the trail and Trapper's Trail.

Mother of the railroad

In 1863 with all the political dickering over railroad legislation, entrepreneurs opened their pockets and set their sights on the American Southwest leading to the gradual construction east to west of the Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe Railway; the name eponymously reflecting the intentions of the founders, the expected eastern terminus to be in Atchison, Kansas, a town founded upon the carrying trade and its support industries, freight companies and their providers.

Inside Kansas, the AT&SF railway's roadbed, by and large, more or less copied and paralleled the Santa Fe Trail route after reaching Topeka as it extended trackage west in the period of 1868–1874. When a railroad bridge was built across the Missouri connecting the eastern markets to the Dodge City cattle trail and Colorado Coal mines, the railroad spurred the growth of Kansas City where the railroad came to cross the Missouri River. Kansas City was on the opposite shore from Saint Joseph, Missouri, one of several historically recognized trail head towns feeding settlers into the Trail and the American West. Building the railway so that it extended westwards to destinations in and beyond the New Mexico border were much delayed as the sparsely settled territory about the mainline, kept the fledgling railroad gasping for operating cash flow. In a move to boot strap their own base market, the railway began offering packaged "Shopping Excursion deals" to potential buyers desiring to look over a real estate parcel and involving discounting such trips to visit its land offices and giving back the ticket price as part of the purchase price if a sale was concluded.

The railroad was cleverly selling the land grant off it had received from congress, which caused the strip along the rail and Trail to bloom with new towns and business—which created railway traffic and revenues in a reinforcing synergy of capitalism. Its economic base established, the railway gradually extended west gradually adding new connections through rougher west country serviced by the western Trail. With the rails overtaking the Trail, the traffic and freight and other traffic diminished little by little until most all the trail's traffic was local trade. In a sense, after World War I the trail was reborn, by the 1920s it was gradually becoming paved over automobile roads.