Mexico inherited from Spain a bankrupt treasury, a two-tier society, a distant northern border undergoing guerilla warfare from marauding Nations of Americans. They relaxed a Spanish ban on immigrants and imports to enhance the diversity, and the goods available to the northern frontier as well as augment the population.
A torrent of traffic built the Santa Fe Trail that continued until locomotives pulled into Santa Fe six decades later. In addition to merchandise, hundreds of frontiersmen and merchants brought muskets, powder, shot and whiskey to another market. Foreigners, predominantly American, established clandestine relations with Indigenous Americans in their homelands of high desert and forested mountains remote from government surveillance. These Indigenous Peoples furnished contraband mules in exchange for American merchandise, weaponry, and alcohol.
American barter enabled the Apache, Navaho, Ute, Comanche to expand their relentless raids that kept the region unstable in turn weakening Mexican resistance during the coming war with the United States. Before the Mexican Government grasped the unintended consequences it was too late, too few resources brought to bear on activities too remote to patrol or administer effectively.
At Independence in 1821 New Mexico’s population of thirty thousand2 resided north and south of Santa Fe in the Upper Rio Grande Valley. The population and principal wealth of New Mexico resided south of the capital.3 Through two centuries, villages coalesced from former ranchos and haciendas to protect citizens from roaming marauders. Ignoring government advice, many settlers erected home sites close to their acreage creating straggly communities of scattered ranchos.4 Like the Pueblo Indian, the New Mexican was a farmer who lived in a village.
The condition of an impoverished, downtrodden majority troubled merchants arriving in New Mexico. Abject poverty, reduced living conditions, lack of security and equality for the masses unsettled Yankee traders.
Captain Becknell’s Journal,
From all that we can learn from these travelers, the people of Santa Fe and of the internal provinces are exceedingly ignorant, destitute of commerce, and of all spirit of enterprise.5
Colonel Marmaduke observations,
Some very wealthy, but by far the greater part are the most miserable, wretched, poor creatures I have ever seen.6
Santa Fe, the most remote provincial capital in the Kingdom of Spain, if not the world, lay fifteen hundred miles from Mexico City seven to nine months travel time but just seven hundred & fifty miles and two months from the Missouri border, then the western end of the United States.
A trickle of traders trekked across [now] Kansas leading horses, mules laden with trade goods conveying American manufactured articles on round trips to the new neighbor. Within a few years, a twenty-three-wagon caravan replaced pack animals and created rutted paths leading the way to the next fifty years of Trail existence.
References
[2] (Fowler 2000)
[3] (Gregg 1954)
[4] (Wozniak 1998)
[5] The intrepid merchants entering Santa Fe for the first-time experienced culture shock. Many judged Mexican workers from a perspective as former military officers.
[6] (Marmaduke 1911)
Bibliography
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