The Old Spanish Trail became a commercial trail network after Mexican trader Antonio Armijo led the first successful caravan in 1829, seeking profit by carrying New Mexico serapes and other woolen goods to Los Angeles and bringing California-bred horses and mules back to Santa Fe across the deserts and mountains of Mexico's far northern frontier. Built from indigenous footpaths and earlier trade and exploration routes, the network later guided travelers including John C. Fremont, who followed it east from California in 1844 to the Parowan Valley before turning away, and whose maps and diaries of its western section helped Mormon settlers develop it into a wagon-passable road to Los Angeles by 1847. In 1848 Orville Pratt recorded the severe descent of Little Creek and then praised the Paraowan Valley as one of the finest and most extensive valleys he had seen in the western country. Through Iron County, Spanish explorers traveled nearly 100 miles on routes now followed by major highways, and Enoch later became a major trading post along the Northern Route in the mid-1800s. The trail's routes came together at the Fork of Roads east of present-day Barstow in the Mojave Desert, crossed Cajon Pass between the San Gabriel and San Bernadino Mountains, and then reached Mission San Gabriel and Los Angeles. Among its principal branches were the Northern Route, first blazed by William Wolfskill and George C. Yount in 1831 through southern Colorado and central Utah; the Mojave Road, a 188-mile desert crossing long used by Indians, Spanish explorers, and missionaries and first traveled by Jedediah Smith in 1826; the North Branch through Taos, Cochetona Pass, and the Gunnison River Valley; and the Armijo Route from Abiquiú by way of the San Juan River, the Crossing of the Fathers, the Muddy River, the Amargosa and Mojave Rivers, and Cajon Pass to Mission San Gabriel.