Santa Fe TrailEdit

The Santa Fe Trail was one of the great conduits of 19th-century American commerce, linking the Missouri River basin's growing towns with the Southwest’s thriving frontier settlements. Opened in the early 1820s, the trail carried goods, people, and ideas across the Plains and into the high desert markets of what would become the New Mexico Territory. The route stretched roughly 900 miles (about 1,450 kilometers) from Independence, Missouri, to Santa Fe, passing through present-day Kansas, Colorado, and New Mexico. The founding moment is usually anchored to the expedition of trader William Becknell in 1821, whose bold trip established a regular overland link and demonstrated the viability of private entrepreneurship to knit distant regions into a single national economy.