The Old Santa Fe Trail: The Story of a Great Highway Part 10

Independence very soon became the best market west of St. Louis for cattle, mules, and wagons; the trade of which the place was the acknowledged headquarters furnis.h.i.+ng employment to several thousand men, including the teamsters and packers on the Trail. The wages paid varied from twenty-five to fifty dollars a month and rations. The price charged for hauling freight to Santa Fe was ten dollars a hundred pounds, each wagon earning from five to six hundred dollars every trip, which was made in eighty or ninety days; some fast caravans making quicker time.

The merchants and general traders of Independence in those days reaped a grand harvest. Everything to eat was in constant demand; mules and oxen were sold in great numbers every month at excellent prices and always for cash; while any good stockman could readily make from ten to fifty dollars a day.

One of the largest manufacturers and most enterprising young men in Independence at that time was Hiram Young, a coloured man. Besides making hundreds of wagons, he made all the ox-yokes used in the entire traffic; fifty thousand annually during the '50's and until the breaking out of the war. The forward yokes were sold at an average of one dollar and a quarter, the wheel yokes a dollar higher.

The freight transported by the wagons was always very securely loaded; each package had its contents plainly marked on the outside. The wagons were heavily covered and tightly closed. Every man belonging to the caravan was thoroughly armed, and ever on the alert to repulse an attack by the Indians.

Sometimes at the crossing of the Arkansas the quicksands were so bad that it was necessary to get the caravan over in a hurry; then forty or fifty yoke of oxen were hitched to one wagon and it was quickly yanked through the treacherous ford. This was not always the case, however; it depended upon the stage of water and recent floods.

After the close of the war with Mexico, the freight business across the plains increased to a wonderful degree. The possession of the country by the United States gave a fresh impetus to the New Mexico trade, and the traffic then began to be divided between Westport and Kansas City.

Independence lost control of the overland commerce and Kansas City commenced its rapid growth. Then came the discovery of gold in California, and this gave an increased business westward; for thousands of men and their families crossed the plains and the Rocky Mountains, seeking their fortunes in the new El Dorado. The Old Trail was the highway of an enormous pilgrimage, and both Independence and Kansas City became the initial point of a wonderful emigration.

In Independence may still be seen a few of the old landmarks when it was the headquarters of the Santa Fe trade.

An overland mail was started from the busy town as early as 1849. In an old copy of the Missouri _Commonwealth_, published there under the date of July, 1850, which I found on file in the Kansas State Historical Society, there is the following account of the first mail stage westward:--

We briefly alluded, some days since, to the Santa Fe line of mail stages, which left this city on its first monthly journey on the 1st instant. The stages are got up in elegant style, and are each arranged to convey eight pa.s.sengers. The bodies are beautifully painted, and made water-tight, with a view of using them as boats in ferrying streams. The team consists of six mules to each coach.

The mail is guarded by eight men, armed as follows: Each man has at his side, fastened in the stage, one of Colt's revolving rifles; in a holster below, one of Colt's long revolvers, and in his belt a small Colt's revolver, besides a hunting-knife; so that these eight men are ready, in case of attack, to discharge one hundred and thirty-six shots without having to reload. This is equal to a small army, armed as in the ancient times, and from the looks of this escort, ready as they are, either for offensive or defensive warfare with the savages, we have no fears for the safety of the mails.

The accommodating contractors have established a sort of base of refitting at Council Grove, a distance of one hundred and fifty miles from this city, and have sent out a blacksmith, and a number of men to cut and cure hay, with a quant.i.ty of animals, grain, and provisions; and we understand they intend to make a sort of traveling station there, and to commence a farm. They also, we believe, intend to make a similar settlement at Walnut Creek next season. Two of their stages will start from here the first of every month.

The old stage-coach days were times of Western romance and adventure, and the stories told of that era of the border have a singular fascination in this age of annihilation of distance.

Very few, if any, of the famous men who handled the "ribbons" in those dangerous days of the slow journey across the great plains are among the living; like the clumsy and forgotten coaches they drove, they have themselves been mouldering into dust these many years.

In many places on the line of the Trail, where the hard hills have not been subjected to the plough, the deep ruts cut by the lumbering Concord coaches may yet be distinctly traced. Particularly are they visible from the Atchison, Topeka, and Santa Fe track, as the cars thunder rapidly toward the city of Great Bend, in Kansas, three miles east of that town.

Let the tourist as he crosses Walnut Creek look out of his window toward the east at an angle of about thirty-five degrees, and on the flint hills which slope gradually toward the railroad, he will observe, very distinctly, the Old Trail, where it once drew down from the divide to make the ford at the little stream.

The monthly stages started from each end of the route at the same time; later the service was increased to once a week; after a while to three times, until in the early '60's daily stages were run from both ends of the route, and this was continued until the advent of the railroad.

Each coach carried eleven pa.s.sengers, nine closely stowed inside--three on a seat--and two on the outside on the boot with the driver. The fare to Santa Fe was two hundred and fifty dollars, the allowance of baggage being limited to forty pounds; all in excess of that cost half a dollar a pound. In this now seemingly large sum was included the board of the travellers, but they were not catered to in any extravagant manner; hardtack, bacon, and coffee usually exhausted the menu, save that at times there was an abundance of antelope and buffalo.

There was always something exciting in those journeys from the Missouri to the mountains in the lumbering Concord coach. There was the constant fear of meeting the wily red man, who persistently hankered after the white man's hair. Then there was the playfulness of the sometimes drunken driver, who loved to upset his tenderfoot travellers in some arroya, long after the moon had sunk below the horizon.

It required about two weeks to make the trip from the Missouri River to Santa Fe, unless high water or a fight with the Indians made it several days longer. The animals were changed every twenty miles at first, but later, every ten, when faster time was made. What sleep was taken could only be had while sitting bolt upright, because there was no laying over; the stage continued on night and day until Santa Fe was reached.

After a few years, the company built stations at intervals varying from ten miles to fifty or more; and there the animals and drivers were changed, and meals furnished to travellers, which were always substantial, but never elegant in variety or cleanliness.

Who can ever forget those meals at the "stations," of which you were obliged to partake or go hungry: biscuit hard enough to serve as "round-shot," and a vile decoction called, through courtesy, coffee--but G.o.d help the man who disputed it!

Some stations, however, were notable exceptions, particularly in the mountains of New Mexico, where, aside from the bread--usually only tortillas, made of the blue-flint corn of the country--and coffee composed of the saints may know what, the meals were excellent. The most delicious brook trout, alternating with venison of the black-tailed deer, elk, bear, and all the other varieties of game abounding in the region cost you one dollar, but the station-keeper a mere trifle; no wonder the old residents and ranchmen on the line of the Old Trail lament the good times of the overland stage!

Thirteen years ago I revisited the once well-known Kosloskie's Ranch, a picturesque cabin at the foot of the Glorieta Mountains, about half a mile from the ruins on the Rio Pecos. The old Pole was absent, but his wife was there; and, although I had not seen her for fifteen years, she remembered me well, and at once began to deplore the changed condition of the country since the advent of the railroad, declaring it had ruined their family with many others. I could not disagree with her view of the matter, as I looked on the debris of a former relative greatness all around me. I recalled the fact that once Kosloskie's Ranch was the favourite eating station on the Trail; where you were ever sure of a substantial meal--the main feature of which was the delicious brook trout, which were caught out of the stream which ran near the door while you were was.h.i.+ng the dust out of your eyes and ears.

The trout have vacated the Pecos; the ranch is a ruin, and stands in grim contrast with the old temple and church on the hill; and both are monuments of civilizations that will never come again.

Weeds and sunflowers mark the once broad trail to the quaint Aztec city, and silence reigns in the beautiful valley, save when broken by the pa.s.sage of "The Flyer" of the Atchison, Topeka, and Santa Fe railway, as it struggles up the heavy grade of the Glorieta Mountains a mile or more distant.

Besides the driver, there was another employee--the conductor or messenger, as he was called. He had charge of the mail and express matter, collected the fares, and attended generally to the requirements of those committed to his care during the tedious journey; for he was not changed like the driver, but stayed with the coach from its starting to its destination. Sometimes fourteen individuals were accommodated in case of emergency; but it was terribly crowded and uncomfortable riding, with no chance to stretch your limbs, save for a few moments at stations where you ate and changed animals.

In starting from Independence, powerful horses were attached to the coach--generally four in number; but at the first station they were exchanged for mules, and these animals hauled it the remainder of the way. Drivers were changed about eight times in making the trip to Santa Fe; and some of them were comical fellows, but full of nerve and endurance, for it required a man of nerve to handle eight frisky mules through the rugged pa.s.ses of the mountains, when the snow was drifted in immense ma.s.ses, or when descending the curved, icy declivities to the base of the range. A cool head was highly necessary; but frequently accidents occurred and sometimes were serious in their results.

A snowstorm in the mountains was a terrible thing to encounter by the coach; all that could be done was to wait until it had abated, as there was no going on in the face of the blinding sheets of intensely cold vapour which the wind hurled against the sides of the mountains.

All inside of the coach had to sit still and shake with the freezing branches of the tall trees around them. A summer hailstorm was much more to be dreaded, however; for nowhere else on the earth do the hailstones shoot from the clouds of greater size or with greater velocity than in the Rocky Mountains. Such an event invariably frightened the mules and caused them to stampede; and, to escape death from the coach rolling down some frightful abyss, one had to jump out, only to be beaten to a jelly by the ma.s.ses of ice unless shelter could be found under some friendly ledge of rock or the thick limbs of a tree.

Nothing is more fatiguing than travelling for the first day and night in a stage-coach; after that, however, one gets used to it and the remainder of the journey is relatively comfortable.

The only way to alleviate the monotony of riding hour after hour was to walk; occasionally this was rendered absolutely necessary by some accident, such as breaking a wheel or axle, or when an animal gave out before a station was reached. In such cases, however, no deduction was made from the fare, that having been collected in advance, so it cost you just as much whether you rode or walked. You could exercise your will in the matter, but you must not lag behind the coach; the savages were always watching for such derelicts, and your hair was the forfeit!

In the worst years, when the Indians were most decidedly on the war-trail, the government furnished an escort of soldiers from the military posts; they generally rode in a six-mule army-wagon, and were commanded by a sergeant or corporal; but in the early days, before the army had concentrated at the various forts on the great plains, the stage had to rely on the courage and fighting qualities of its occupants, and the nerve and the good judgment of the driver. If the latter understood his duty thoroughly and was familiar with the methods of the savages, he always chose the cover of darkness in which to travel in localities where the danger from Indians was greater than elsewhere; for it is a rare thing in savage warfare to attack at night. The early morning seemed to be their favourite hour, when sleep oppresses most heavily; and then it was that the utmost vigilance was demanded.

One of the most confusing things to the novice riding over the great plains is the idea of distance; mile after mile is travelled on the monotonous trail, with a range of hills or a low divide in full sight, yet hours roll by and the objects seem no nearer than when they were first observed. The reason for this seems to be that every atom of vapour is eliminated from the air, leaving such an absolute clearness of atmosphere, such an indescribable transparency of s.p.a.ce through which distant objects are seen, that they are magnified and look nearer than they really are. Consequently, the usual method of calculating distance and areas by the eye is ever at fault until custom and familiarity force a new standard of measure.

Mirages, too, were of frequent occurrence on the great plains; some of them wonderful examples of the refracting properties of light. They a.s.sumed all manner of fantastic, curious shapes, sometimes ludicrously distorting the landscape; objects, like a herd of buffalo for instance, though forty miles away, would seem to be high in air, often reversed, and immensely magnified in their proportions.

Violent storms were also frequent incidents of the long ride. I well remember one night, about thirty years ago, when the coach in which I and one of my clerks were riding to Fort Dodge was suddenly brought to a standstill by a terrible gale of wind and hail. The mules refused to face it, and quickly turning around nearly overturned the stage, while we, with the driver and conductor, were obliged to hold on to the wheels with all our combined strength to prevent it from blowing down into a stony ravine, on the brink of which we were brought to a halt.

Fortunately, these fearful blizzards did not last very long; the wind ceased blowing so violently in a few moments, but the rain usually continued until morning.

It usually happened that you either at once took a great liking for your driver and conductor, or the reverse. Once, on a trip from Kansas City, nearly a third of a century ago, when I and another man were the only occupants of the coach, we entertained quite a friendly feeling for our driver; he was a good-natured, jolly fellow, full of anecdote and stories of the Trail, over which he had made more than a hundred sometimes adventurous journeys.

When we arrived at the station at Plum Creek, the coach was a little ahead of time, and the driver who was there to relieve ours commenced to grumble at the idea of having to start out before the regular hour. He found fault because we had come into the station so soon, and swore he could drive where our man could not "drag a halter-chain," as he claimed in his boasting. We at once took a dislike to him, and secretly wished that he would come to grief, in order to cure him of his boasting. Sure enough, before we had gone half a mile from the station he incontinently tumbled the coach over into a sandy arroya, and we were delighted at the accident. Finding ourselves free from any injury, we went to work and a.s.sisted him to right the coach--no small task; but we took great delight in reminding him several times of his ability to drive where our old friend could not "drag a halter-chain." It was very dark; neither moon or star visible, the whole heavens covered with an inky blackness of ominous clouds; so he was not so much to be blamed after all.

The very next coach was attacked at the crossing of Cow Creek by a band of Kiowas. The savages had followed the stage all that afternoon, but remained out of sight until just at dark, when they rushed over the low divide, and mounted on their ponies commenced to circle around the coach, making the sand dunes resound with echoes of their infernal yelling, and shaking their buffalo-robes to stampede the mules, at the same time firing their guns at the men who were in the coach, all of whom made a bold stand, but were rapidly getting the worst of it, when fortunately a company of United States cavalry came over the Trail from the west, and drove the savages off. Two of the men in the coach were seriously wounded, and one of the soldiers killed; but the Indian loss was never determined, as they succeeded in carrying off both their dead and wounded.

Mr. W. H. Ryus, a friend of mine now residing in Kansas City, who was a driver and messenger thirty-five years, and had many adventures, told me the following incidents:

I have crossed the plains sixty-five times by wagon and coach. In July, 1861, I was employed by Barnum, Vickery, and Neal to drive over what was known as the Long Route, that is, from Fort Larned to Fort Lyon, two hundred and forty miles, with no station between. We drove one set of mules the whole distance, camped out, and made the journey, in good weather, in four or five days. In winter we generally encountered a great deal of snow, and very cold air on the bleak and wind-swept desert of the Upper Arkansas, but we employees got used to that; only the pa.s.sengers did any kicking. We had a way of managing them, however, when they got very obstreperous; all we had to do was to yell Indians! and that quieted them quicker than forty-rod whiskey does a man.

We gathered buffalo-chips, to boil our coffee and cook our buffalo and antelope steak, smoked for a while around the smouldering fire until the animals were through grazing, and then started on our lonely way again.

Sometimes the coach would travel for a hundred miles through the buffalo herds, never for a moment getting out of sight of them; often we saw fifty thousand to a hundred thousand on a single journey out or in. The Indians used to call them their cattle, and claimed to own them. They did not, like the white man, take out only the tongue, or hump, and leave all the rest to dry upon the prairie, but ate every last morsel, even to the intestines. They said the whites were welcome to all they could eat or haul away, but they did not like to see so much meat wasted as was our custom.

The Indians on the plains were not at all hostile in 1861-62; we could drive into their villages, where there were tens of thousands of them, and they would always treat us to music or a war-dance, and set before us the choicest of their venison and buffalo. In July of the last-mentioned year, Colonel Leavenworth, Jr., was crossing the Trail in my coach. He desired to see Satanta, the great Kiowa chief.

The colonel's father[28] was among the Indians a great deal while on duty as an army officer, while the young colonel was a small boy. The colonel said he didn't believe that old Satanta would know him.

Just before the arrival of the coach in the region of the Indian village, the Comanches and the p.a.w.nees had been having a battle. The Comanches had taken some scalps, and they were camping on the bank of the Arkansas River, where Dodge City is now located. The p.a.w.nees had killed five of their warriors, and the Comanches were engaged in an exciting war-dance; I think there were from twenty to thirty thousand Indians gathered there, men, women, and children of the several tribes--Comanches, Kiowas, Cheyennes, Arapahoes, and others.

When we came in sight of their camp, the colonel knew, by the terrible noise they were making, that a war-dance was going on; but we did not know then whether it was on account of troubles among themselves, or because of a fight with the whites, but we were determined to find out. If he could get to the old chief, all would be right. So he and I started for the place whence the noise came. We met a savage and the colonel asked him whether Satanta was there, and what was going on. When he told us that they had had a fight and it was a scalp-dance, our hair lowered; for we knew that if it was in consequence of trouble with the whites, we stood in some danger of losing our own scalps.

The Indian took us in, and the situation, too; and conducted us into the presence of Satanta, who stood in the middle of the great circle, facing the dancers. It was out on an island in the stream; the chief stood very erect, and eyed us closely for a few seconds, then the colonel told his own name that the Indians had known him by when he was a boy.

Satanta gave one bound--he was at least ten feet from where we were waiting--grasped the colonel's hand and excitedly kissed him, then stood back for another instant, gave him a second squeeze, offered his hand to me, which I, of course, shook heartily, then he gazed at the man he had known as a boy so many years ago, with a countenance beaming with delight. I never saw any one, even among the white race, manifest so much joy as the old chief did over the visit of the colonel to his camp.

He immediately ordered some of his young men to go out and herd our mules through the night, which they brought back to us at daylight. He then had the coach hauled to the front of his lodge, where we could see all that was going on to the best advantage. We had six travellers with us on this journey, and it was a great sight for the tenderfeet.

It was about ten o'clock at night when we arrived at Satanta's lodge, and we saw thousands of squaws and bucks dancing and mourning for their dead warriors. At midnight the old chief said we must eat something at once. So he ordered a fire built, cooked buffalo and venison, setting before us the very best that he had, we furnis.h.i.+ng canned fruit, coffee, and sugar from our coach mess. There we sat, and talked and ate until morning; then when we were ready to start off, Satanta and the other chiefs of the various tribes escorted us about eight miles on the Trail, where we halted for breakfast, they remaining and eating with us.

Colonel Leavenworth was on his way to a.s.sume command of one of the military posts in New Mexico; the Indians begged him to come back and take his quarters at either Fort Larned or Fort Dodge. They told him they were afraid their agent was stealing their goods and selling them back to them; while if the Indians took anything from the whites, a war was started.