Between 1800 and 1850, the Old Spanish Trail became a regional trade route between Santa Fe and California. Dominguez and Escalante traveled through this valley in 1776, and within twenty-five years of their expedition the trail became a regional trade route between the Spanish outposts in what is now California and New Mexico. Under the watchful eye of the Spanish government and later the Mexican government, both legal and illegal traders ventured deep into the Great Basin to barter with the Ute Indians. Sheep and textiles from New Mexico were traded for mules and horses in southern California and brought back for use on the Santa Fe Trail between Missouri and what is now New Mexico. One prominent traveler on the trail was Antoine Robidoux, who used this snow-free route to supply Fort Uncompahgre on the Gunnison River. Robidoux traded cotton, blankets, tobacco, tea, coffee, knives, liquor, and an occasional rifle to the Ute Indians in exchange for deer skin clothes, beaver pelts, and castoreum, a beaver scent gland used to make perfume and medicine. Slaves were also traded and moved along the Old Spanish Trail, and Ute, Paiute, and Navajo Indians, as well as young Hispanic women, were often illegally bartered and sold as slaves in colonial New Mexico. In 1828, Robidoux established Fort Uncompahgre on the Gunnison River and Fort Uintah on the Green River. In 1830, New Mexico Governor Jose Antonio Chavez said that a company of sixty men had left for California to trade for mules with the products of New Mexico and that promoting this commerce would greatly benefit both territories. In the early 1800s, the Old Spanish Trail was entirely within Spanish Territory, and Santa Fe became a trade center as the terminus for three trails in the southwest United States.