National Parks Traveler

On The Santa Fe National Historic Trail | Ruts And Twisters

By Barbara "Bo'' Jensen

Night is falling across prairie grasses surrounding the shore of Storrie Lake, just outside of Las Vegas, New Mexico. As the sun sets behind the Sangre de Cristo Mountains, I watch from the arched opening of my tent, imagining I’m looking out from a covered wagon at the cattle grazing nearby and geese settling on the water for the evening.

It’s early May, and my first night on the Santa Fe National Historic Trail. By morning, I’m doing my best to retrace it along the official Auto Tour Route, small highways that closely follow the original trailway. The National Park Service map I keep consulting is eight inches tall – and three feet long, overwhelming, like the five-state, 900-mile trail itself, unfolding in sections on my passenger seat and beneath my wheels.

This year marks the 200th anniversary of this epic journey. From 1821–1880, teams pulling heavily loaded wagons made this overland crossing in about eight weeks. With my 21st century horsepower, I will travel its entirety in eight days.

But there’s a complication: the Santa Fe Trail is divided. It splits. The two routes run hundreds of miles apart. Since I’m coming from New Mexico, I’ve decided to travel the more southern Cimarron Route on my way to the eastern terminus of the trail in Franklin, Missouri; I’ll take the northern Mountain Route when I return to Santa Fe.

This west-to-east travel was as common as the stereotypical idea of wagon trains starting “back East” and heading toward the mountains. The Santa Fe Trail wasn’t created by families moving west – it was the two-way interstate highway of its day, made for transporting commerce. An international highway, once you crossed the Arkansas River.

When word reached the United States that Mexico had won its independence from Spain in 1821, businessman William Becknell and party set off to develop a long-sought trade partnership with Santa Fe, hauling items like iron tools, silk, and cotton fabric to exchange for silver, wool, and the Mexican donkeys favored for breeding Missouri mules. Wagons were loaded to the hilt going in both directions.

The Mexican port of entry for this border would have been the sleepy village of Las Vegas, 200 miles south of the river. Today, the Santa Fe Trail here is literally an interstate highway. From Las Vegas, I drive I-25 north to Wagon Mound, the westernmost natural landmark on the trail that does indeed look like a covered wagon. At this point, Becknell and other traders had to choose between more than a northerly or southerly course: the Mountain Route – safer but longer, with more difficult terrain – vs. the dangerous Cimarron cutoff through Apache and Comanche territories, native people who quickly came to resent the constant incursion of wagon trains rumbling across their hunting grounds. The shorter Cimarron Route was dotted with unreliable water holes and featured a 60-mile stretch ahead of me known as La Jornada de Muerto – loosely translated: the Day of Death.

Day 1: In A Rut

At LJM’s Travel Center, a tiny gas station by Wagon Mound with a full liquor store on the side, I ask about finding wagon tracks. I follow Old Ernie’s directions out to two small, fenced cemeteries in the low hills above town. A couple of pale, scruffy horses graze disinterestedly between the rickety gates on either side.

Charles Fraker, Guardian of the Plains/Barbara Jensen

Wandering carefully among family gravesites, I spy an unusually tall white stone bearing a different name: Charles L. Fraker, 1841-1922. Vanguard of The Plains Santa Fe Trail 1855-1868. A Santa Fe Trail freighter, his tombstone is topped with an incredibly detailed relief-carving depicting a team of oxen pulling a covered wagon over rocky scrubland, a scout on horseback leading the way.

I scan the ground beneath the marker and beyond the cemetery, but I don’t really know what I’m looking for. Maybe double ruts of wagon wheels? I don’t understand these notations of “visible ruts” on my map. Nothing looks like a trail.

Driving east down Highway 56, I cross the Canadian River but still don’t see any tracks I can recognize. After traveling hours in the sun, I stop to eat at covered roadside picnic tables, imagining a lunch break for a wagon train. But where?

A small dirt road at the end of the picnic pullout leads back toward a Trail landmark called “Point of Rocks.” CR52/Dorsey Road; it’s not on my map. Driving along at just under 20 mph, lark buntings suddenly flock around me from the grassland on either side of the road, as if to carry me along with them, flying beside my open windows and crisscrossing like daredevils over the hood of my car. Something is happening.

Driving over a shallow wash, the low spot suddenly catches my eye…because it doesn't look like a typical wash. I brake in a cloud of dust. A wide depression – unnaturally straight, like a sunken, multilane highway of dirt – skirts Point of Rocks, cutting diagonally across the fenced pastures directly toward the Canadian River and Wagon Mound.

I step out of the car, my mouth hanging open. Until I cough. I have found the wagon ruts of the original Santa Fe Trail.

By the time I reach Clayton in eastern New Mexico, I have driven 215 miles from Santa Fe; based on the freight wagon average of 18 miles per day, I have covered 12 days of historic travel. I camp on a low cliff above peaceful Clayton Lake, watching the wildlife at water’s edge as heavy clouds gather at dusk.

But those ominous clouds continue to build as I sleep, delivering one massive, blinding jolt of lightning in the middle of the night – I see it through my closed eyes, gasping awake as a cannon shot of thunder echoes off the cliffs, growling off into the darkness as the rain begins.

It is a portent of tomorrow.

A rutted vestige from the past/Barbara Jensen

Santa Fe National Historic Trail stretches across five states connecting Frankin, Missouri and Santa Fe, New Mexico. The trail served as a vital commercial highway until 1880 when the railroad arrived in Santa Fe. Bring home an official park product from Western National Parks Association that celebrates the trail’s upcoming bicentennial.

Day 2: Tornado Warning

Highway 406 leads me from Clayton to Kiowa National Grasslands, a short-grass prairie preserve, featuring – at a crossroads in the middle of nowhere – two covered picnic tables, a pristine pit toilet, and the Santa Fe Trail Interpretive Site. Squared limestone posts rise up out of the grasses and yucca, aligned so visitors can walk along 2½ miles of the trail. For three hours, I follow the wide swales over gently undulating hills that seem to go on forever, just me and the meadowlarks, and the cattle grazing between low, scraggly junipers, where rattlesnakes hide midday. Thick white clouds swell in the distance, but neither the cool breeze nor my SPF30 sunscreen is enough to save me from the intense sun exposure. I drive away with a rosy reminder of yet another hardship of this trail.

Back on Highway 56, I enter the Oklahoma Panhandle, passing through tiny Felt, and then Boise City. These are water tower towns, their names emblazoned on the elevated tanks. Heavy, metal pump arms of oil wells slowly rise and fall outside the city limits. Grain elevators sit by the railroad tracks, waiting for the harvest of dryland wheat fields, green blurs behind barbwire as I speed by.

The cloudy sky is growing darker by the minute. At Boise City, I turn north up Highway 385/287. I want to visit Cold Springs, Autograph Rock, and Inscription Rock in the highlands rising above the Cimarron River. But a huge, purple storm cell seems to be stalking me. As I reach Wolf Mountain, multiple semi rigs have already pulled off the highway, hunkering down in the parking near the named rocks. Black thunderheads twist and writhe; lightning is buzzing and crackling everywhere overhead, close and terrifying. I crank a decisive U-turn, and as the wind begins to roar, I hurtle back the way I came, chased through heavy rain and heart-pounding, fearsome thunder, scanning suspicious swirlings for funnel clouds.

At a highway rest stop, I whip the car in, just as the storm unleashes its full wrath. All through the night, the wind rages, furiously rocking my vehicle. I have never been so glad to be sleeping in my car, imagining instead a canvas-topped wagon. Another 200 miles, another 10 days it would have taken to cross stormy Oklahoma. Here in Tornado Alley, I feel like I am dead center in La Jornada – but I haven’t even gotten there yet.

Day 3: Constant Winds

At the blustery Kansas border next morning, I still breathe a sigh of relief: “Good-byyye, Oklahoma.” The sun has returned. I take K-27 from Elkhart to Cimarron National Grassland, where another tall Point of Rocks landmark overlooks a well-used Santa Fe Trail camp. This Point of Rocks has a path to the top. Middle Spring below is a tiny pond, hidden amid thick grass and cattails, guarded from the dessicating winds by a meandering copse of cottonwoods following the sporadic Cimarron River.

Today's national grasslands, such as the Kiowa National Grassland, reflect the view 19th century freighters had/NPS file

Freighter Josiah Gregg wrote about stopping here during the 1830s in his book Commerce of the Prairies, noting this grassland’s major feature: “These severe winds are very prevalent upon the great western prairies, … about as regular and unceasing as the 'trade winds' of the ocean. It will often blow a gale for days, and even weeks together, without slacking for a moment ….” After just a half-mile of leaning into the wind, holding onto my hat so it won’t blow away, I decide not to add windburn to my sunburn, returning to the car.