For twenty-five years from 1821 to 1846, the Santa Fe Trail was an important trade route linking the United States and Mexico, carrying caravans of wagons over 800 miles between Missouri and Santa Fe, then the capital of northern Mexico, with textiles, tools, and household goods going south and wool, fur, mules, and silver coming north. Traders from the United States and Mexico often cooperated to keep the caravans moving, but at the start of the Mexican-American War in 1846, the Army of the West used the trail to invade Mexico, and when the war ended two years later, New Mexico became part of the United States. Early travelers chose either the Cimarron Route across exposed semiarid country or the more difficult Mountain Route over Raton Pass, where water was available but the road climbed through a rough mountain notch. Crossing Raton Pass was the hardest part of the Mountain Route, with narrow defiles, boulders, steep drop-offs, violent thunderstorms, and washed-out roadbeds forcing wagons that had spread across the plains in several columns to move in single file; by the 1840s, Missouri-built freight wagons drawn by oxen or mules commonly carried about 6,000 pounds of goods. After the war ended in 1848, the U.S. Army established first in the vicinity, offering protection to travelers on this route. The trail remained a vital commercial highway until 1880, when the railroad reached Santa Fe. Today's highway over Raton Pass parallels the toll road built in 1866 by Richens Lacy "Uncle Dick" Wootton, who improved about twenty-seven miles of the road by cutting hillsides, blasting and removing rocks, and building many bridges, then operated a tollgate while allowing Indians to pass free of charge. In 1879 the Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe Railroad bought the right of way from him, and the following year its line reached Santa Fe, ending the era of the Santa Fe Trail. Wootton, born in Mecklenburg County, Virginia, at age nineteen went west and joined William Bent in moving a wagon caravan down the trail, then spent the next fifty-seven years in Colorado as a trader, trapper, hunter, farmer, freighter, merchant, and road builder, and at his home near the toll road stagecoach passengers found hot lunches and plentiful stories.