The Santa Fe Trail was one of the great overland trade routes of the 19th century, connecting Franklin, Missouri, with Santa Fe, New Mexico, across 900 miles of rough terrain and carrying trade in both directions. Pioneered in 1821 by William Becknell, it quickly became a busy commercial route handling hundreds of wagon trains a year and moving goods worth millions of dollars in today’s currency, while also linking Mexico and Santa Fe to eastern cities such as New Orleans and New York and onward to ports in Europe. The trail was traveled by American and Mexican traders, Indians, fur trappers, buffalo hunters, adventurers, scouts such as Kit Carson, soldiers protecting caravans and supplying forts along the route, journalists, tourists, loafers, and invalids seeking health, though very few women made the journey. From the start, Mexicans and Hispanics traveled east with silver, mules, buffalo hides, and beaver furs, and by the end of the trail era Hispanic travelers made up as much as 90% of its traffic. Among those associated with the trail were Susan Shelby Magoffin, a young Kentucky woman who traveled to Santa Fe and into Mexico in 1846 and later chronicled the trip, Josiah Gregg, who joined a caravan in 1831, made the trip eight times, and wrote Commerce of the Prairies in 1844, and the Romeros of Las Vegas, a native New Mexican family that prospered in the freighting trade in the late 1850s. Beginning in the late 1840s, the trail also became an important military road, with soldiers escorting wagon trains and supplying forts such as Fort Larned, Fort Dodge, and Fort Union. The coming of the railroad in 1880 brought the era of the Santa Fe Trail to an end.