The Kingdom of Spain imposed isolation on their colonies in the western hemisphere by prohibiting immigration and trade in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. These statutes quarantined New Spain from developing business ties with the westward expanding United States. Spain siphoned off precious metals from the Americas to feed their indulgences impeding development of a market economy that would have facilitated autonomy, equality, upward mobility in New Spain.
At the end of a supply chain fifteen hundred miles north of Mexico City lay their most populous province, Nuevo Mexico. By 1821 New Mexico citizens resided north and south of Santa Fe throughout the valley of the Rio Grande1. Desperately poor and uneducated, the majority strove to subsist in this remote outpost of Mexico. The Alta Province of California and Texas each contained just a few thousand citizens.
Early merchants on the Santa Fe Trail sought opportunities after Mexican Independence opened borders to foreigners and commerce. The trickle of traders travelling west from Missouri became a flood, first on mules and horses but soon wagons in caravans covered the seven hundred fifty miles to Santa Fe or Taos in a little over two months. The new Republic welcomed American trade and merchants providing variety, higher quality, lower cost modern merchandise. Handmade Mexican commodities did not compete with hardware and dry goods caravanning down the Trail.
During the early years, expeditions to Mexico were not for the faint of heart. Intrepid, military veterans and pioneers of the western expansion of the United States overcame starvation, injury, death, freezing, aridity, stampedes, grizzles and Indigenous American hostility.
No later than 1824, Mexican brokers and agents met arriving caravans in Santa Fe purchasing then transshipping wagon loads of merchandise and fabrics south to the richer populous states of Chihuahua, Sonora and Coahuila filling the vacuum of trade resulting from Spanish rule. The Santa Fe Trail evolved into a commodities pipeline serving northern Mexican citizens and, over its sixty-year life, reached far into the interior of the Republic.
Trail commerce resulted in tons of Mexican silver, gold coin, beaver pelt along with thousands of mules and breeding donkeys transported each year to Missouri.
References
[1] (Fowler 2000)
Bibliography
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