A long north-south route along the foot of the Rockies has served as a natural transportation corridor for ten thousand years, carrying Native peoples, Spanish explorers, U.S. pathfinders, and Colorado's first permanent settlers from Mexico into the Arkansas River country beginning in the 1820s. Known in different stretches and eras as the Taos Trail, Trapper's Trail, Cherokee Trail, and Goodnight-Loving, it remained largely constant from Santa Fe over Raton Pass into the Arkansas Valley, along Fountain and Cherry Creeks to the South Platte, downstream to present-day Greeley, and then overland to Wyoming and points north, evolving from path to rail corridor, paved highway, and interstate. In the post-Civil War cattle era, roughly a quarter of the hundreds of thousands of Texas steers driven north each year came through here on the Goodnight-Loving Trail, helping grow Colorado's cattle population from a scattered handful in 1860 to more than a million by 1880. Charles Goodnight and Oliver Loving pioneered the first cattle trail from Texas to Colorado in 1866, driving 2,000 longhorns nearly one thousand miles and later bringing 30,000 head into Colorado, while Goodnight settled just west of here at Rock Canon Ranch before financial ruin sent him back to Texas. In 1871 William Jackson Palmer founded Colorado Springs as a refined resort and investment center tied to his Denver and Rio Grande rail network, and the town grew fashionable among wealthy residents and English settlers as "Little London." The Cripple Creek gold strike of 1890 transformed it into a busier, more typical frontier community, and later tourism, tuberculosis sanatoriums, Fort Carson, the U.S. Air Force Academy, and NORAD helped make Colorado Springs one of the great cities of the Rockies.