The shared track of the Santa Fe, Oregon, and California trails once passed this way, sometimes muddy and often dusty, as teamsters urged heavy freight wagons to and from New Mexico and pioneer families in the 1840s-50s traveled west toward Oregon and California. Travelers found an ideal camp here with water and good grazing, and by the late 1840s a stage stop called New Santa Fe offered a post office, two general stores, an inn, a shoe shop, drugstore, blacksmith, and saloon as the last stop before entering Indian territory. Santa Fe Trail teamsters, hauling hardware, cloth, furs, and silver, usually walked beside large ox- or mule-drawn freight wagons, while Oregon and California Trail emigrants used smaller farm wagons loaded with food, tools, and family heirlooms for a one-way trip with no room for passengers except perhaps a sick child. The wheels of heavy wagons, thousands of hooves, and the feet of generations of people wore deep ruts into the land, and the rolling, grass-filled swales that remain are the last hints here of these famous western roads. The Santa Fe Trail opened trade barriers from Missouri to Mexico, creating economic inroads into America that tendered riches all the way to Europe, while emigrant wagon trains pressed across the plains and over the Continental Divide toward the promise of wealth and land.
