Santa Fe Trail Resources at the New Mexico State Library: Special Interests

This volume recounts the little-known history of Hispano merchants in the Santa Fe trade during the nineteenth century. Contrary to ethnic stereotypes, Hispanos were ambitious, savvy businessmen who practised the most modern methods of international finance. Their complex transactions linked Santa Fe with Chihuahua City, St. Louis, New Orleans, Philadelphia, New York, London, and Paris. New Mexican merchants like millionaire Felipe Ch+ivez were major figures in the Santa Fe trade until the coming of the railroad in 1880. The practices of Ch+ivez and his competitors convincingly demonstrate why they referred to themselves as 'los capitalistas'. In addition to maps illustrating the international network of the Santa Fe trade, five appendices present data of interest to historians and genealogists, including Mexican merchants who received commercial passports from the Santa Fe customs house, and census data from 1860 and 1870 on Hispano and non-Hispano merchants and freighters."

This profusely illustrated history explores Santa Fe Trade freight wagons and wagon makers. For a half-century until the railroad reached New Mexico in 1880, hundreds of eight wagons yearly hauled commercial goods over the Santa Fe Trail, the major traffic artery between Missouri and New Mexico. The author identifies wagon types and examines wagon makers and their factories, power sources, woodworking machinery, and construction processes. Individual chapters examine Pennsylvania and Missouri wagons, characteristics of freight wagons, the transition from shop to factory, and Dearborns, personal vehicles, and provision wagons. The author also devotes a chapter to the legendary wind wagon. Appendices offer first-person descriptions of merchant trains, rolling stock, and wagon factories.

Travelers and traders taking the Santa Fe Trail's routes from Missouri to New Mexico wrote vivid eyewitness accounts of the diverse and abundant wildlife encountered as they crossed arid plains, high desert, and rugged mountains. Most astonishing to these observers were the incredible numbers of animals, many they had not seen before--buffalo, antelope (pronghorn), prairie dogs, roadrunners, mustangs, grizzlies, and others. They also wrote about the domesticated animals they brought with them, including oxen, mules, horses, and dogs. Their letters, diaries, and memoirs open a window onto an animal world on the plains seen by few people other than the Plains Indians who had lived there for thousands of years. Phyllis S. Morgan has gleaned accounts from numerous primary sources and assembled them into a delightfully informative narrative. She has also explored the lives of the various species, and in this book tells about their behaviors and characteristics, the social relations within and between species, their relationships with humans, and their contributions to the environment and humankind. With skillful prose and a keen eye for a priceless tale, Morgan reanimates the story of life on the Santa Fe Trail's well-worn routes, and its sometimes violent intersection with human life. She provides a stirring view of the land and of the animals visible "as far as the eye could reach," as more than one memoirist described. She also champions the many contributions animals made to the Trail's success and to the opening of the American West.

In a pioneering study of far western commercial enterprise from Santa Fe Trail days to the present, detailed company records reveal the merchants' solutions of monetary exchange, balance of trade, and transportation problems, in depression and prosperity. Finally, the author traces the defeat of mercantile capitalism by modern specialization. New materials give valuable insights into the history of economic development in the western hemisphere. An important book for economists and historians, its frontier stories will delight less specialized readers.

The Frank Brownell Museum of the Southwest presents. "NRA Whittington Center, The Frank Brownell Museum of the Southwest, The Bud and Willa Eyman Library"

"These news reports are written in a vintage style format reflecting a certain year in the Santa Fe Trails history." NM State Library has Vol. 1, no. 1 (1996). Not currently published.