From the earliest days of the New Mexico frontier, El Camino Real was the Royal Road and the only link to the greater world, connecting settlers to the people and markets of Mexico and to Spain. Travel along its 1600-mile course was dangerous, with risks of robbery, Indian attacks, extreme weather, hunger, thirst, injury, and death, yet caravans traveling the route every few years brought what settlers could not make or find locally. By the mid 1700s, two-way trade between Santa Fe, Albuquerque, and Chihuahua, Mexico, was flourishing, as New Mexico's woven textiles and raw materials were exchanged for manufactured goods from around the world, including expensive items for the colony's elite. Clemente Gutierrez became a major force in this trade, sending thousands of sheep south and profiting from a storehouse where settlers brought goods to be packed into caravans and sold in the south. His son Lorenzo and grandson Juan Nepomuceno continued the trade while building their herds and farm fields, and James Hubbell, Juan's son-in-law, maintained it into the 1880s while expanding the family's trading east and west along other trails. Goods headed south included sheep and other livestock, animal hides, buckskins, wool fleeces, woven blankets, stockings, government documents, mail, beeswax candles, captured Indians, pottery, pinon nuts, salt, and tobacco; goods coming north included metal tools, weapons, gunpowder, iron, steel, silver, furniture, mail, food, sugar, wine, olive oil, oysters, chocolate, religious depictions and devotions, barrels of sacramental wine, government documents, musical instruments, porcelain, majolica, mirrors, Chinese silk, fabrics, clothing, paper, shoes, and medicine.