| Wildlife and Nature Books Online in Association with Amazon.com |    |
|
|
|
| The Santa Fe Trail: Its History, Legends, and Lore | 
| Author: David Dary
Publisher: Knopf
Category: Book
List Price: $30.00
Buy Used: $4.47
You Save: $25.53 (85%)
New (6) Collectible (2) from $17.75
Avg. Customer Rating:  15 reviews
Sales Rank: 127870
Media: Hardcover
Edition: 1
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 400
Shipping Weight (lbs): 1.4
Dimensions (in): 9.2 x 6.2 x 1.5
ISBN: 0375403612
Dewey Decimal Number: 978
EAN: 9780375403613
ASIN: 0375403612
Publication Date: November 2000
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
Condition: EX-LIBRARY; used item may have library binding and show stamps, stickers or other marks. Items not meeting quality expectations may be returned for refund. Buy with confidence - your satisfaction is guaranteed at B-Logistics!
|
| Also Available In:
|
| Similar Items:
|
| Editorial Reviews:
Product Description
From 1610, when the Spanish founded the city of Santa Fe, to the 1860s, when the railroad brought unprecedented changes: here is the full, fascinating story of the great Santa Fe Trail which ran between Missouri and Kansas and New Mexico--a lifeline to and from the Southwest for more than two centuries.
Drawing from letters, journals, expedition reports, business records, and newspaper stories, David Dary--one of our foremost historians of the Old West--brings to life the people who laid down the trail and opened commerce with Spanish America: Native Americans and mountain men, traders, trappers, and freighters, surveyors and soldiers, men and women of many different nationalities. Their firsthand accounts let us experience up close the spectacular scenery; the details of camping out in both friendly and hostile Indian territory; the constant danger from natural disasters or sudden attack; the hardworking, often maverick men who were employed on the wagon trains; the pleasures and entertainments at the southern end of the journey.
The book makes clear how in the early years trade started and stopped at the whim of the Spanish, and how the trail finally grew and prospered, bringing the settlement of new towns and the creation of new wealth along the route. We also learn how the rapid spread of the railroads across the country inexorably replaced the long caravans of mule- and ox-drawn wagons, and the way of life they represented.
With his comprehensive knowledge and his exceptional storytelling skills, David Dary has given us a vivid re-creation of an important time and place in American history.
|
| Customer Reviews: Read 10 more reviews...
 Still the Classic on the Trail October 4, 2007
This is still the classic on the Santa Fe Trail. Dary is full of facts and information it would take a lifetime to ferret out from other sources. Unfortunately, he misses the point entirely. Traders flocked to the trail to get rich. How? What goods went to Santa Fe? What goods returned to Missouri?
New Mexico prior to the arrival of the railroads had a subsistance economy. It was metal poor. The tins that came down the Trail sparked an industry; the New Mexicans valued the empty cans and turned them into art. Poor in metal they lacked table utensils and even iron plows. They lacked basic metal tools to build furniture and so sat on adobe bancos. What wealth did the New Mexicans have to buy from the Missouri traders and make the traders rich?
The truth is out there. Try Commerce of the Prairies.
 The Great Western Highway. March 7, 2005
7 out of 7 found this review helpful
Francisco Coronado. Juan de Onate. William Becknell. Kit Carson. Jedediah Smith. Bent's Old Fort. Fort Union. Fort Larned. Fort Dodge. Raton Pass. Glorieta Pass.
Names resounding with history, lore, enterprise, bravery and honor; conjuring up images of treks and trading posts, stagecoaches and scouts, gunfights and gold seekers, cowboys and cavallery regiments, blizzards and buffalo herds, Indians armed to their teeth, army forts, dust, mud, heat, and just about every other cliche in the book of Western storytelling. And, of course, the name that connects them one and all: that of the Santa Fe Trail, the 900 mile-long famous trade route linking Missouri and Kansas with the West until the advent of the railroad in 1880.
Already used by Indian traders long before the white man's arrival, the trail was traveled by 16th century Spanish conquistadors Coronado and Onate during their northward advance from Mexico, searching in vain for the famed golden cities of Cibola. But regular trade relationships with the lands further to the east didn't develop until 200 years later, when the French began to send commercial travelers towards what was then known as "New Spain." This took a great deal of courage on the part of the envoys, not only because of the perils of a voyage into largely uncharted territory but also because the Spanish - seeing a threat to their territorial claims and their fiercely maintained trade monopoly in their territory's northern provinces - often imprisoned French and American parties caught south of the Arkansas River, since 1819 the boundary between the United States and New Spain and, as of 1821, the newly-independent Mexico. But Santa Fe merchants welcomed and secretly promoted trade with the U.S., which they saw as a way to get out of the Spanish government's stranglehold on the economy; and after 1821, the new Mexican government actively promoted trade with the U.S. American suppliers of whiskey, food, medicine, textiles and hardware soon gained profits up to 500 percent in the newly-opened market. After the Unites States' substantial territorial gains resulting from the 1846 - 48 Mexican War, which also included New Mexico, the U.S. Army built a number of forts along the trail to secure it against increasingly fierce Native American raids, which however only stopped with the forced migration of the Indian nations to government-assigned reservations in the 1870s, shortly before the trail's history itself came to an end with the arrival of a railroad locomotive in Santa Fe in early 1880. In 1987 - a little more than a century later - Congress designated the Santa Fe Trail a national historic trail.
Over the course of its history, the Santa Fe Trail saw some of the most prominent faces of the old West; from William Becknell, whose 1821 trip made the city of Franklin, MO, its first major eastern terminus, to Kit Carson, barely sixteen years old when he started working as a wagon train teamster in 1826, and Jedidiah Smith, who reportedly killed no less than thirteen Comanches before succumbing to their lances near Cimarron Spring in southwestern Kansas in 1831. Events such as the 1862 battle at Glorieta Pass, where Union troops crushed Confederate hopes of taking over New Mexico as a major Civil War prize, and the 1864 Kiowa raid of Fort Larned's entire herd of 172 horses, further fueled the danger-shrouded, mythical status of the trail, its travelers, and the events surrounding both.
David Dary's fascinating "Santa Fe Trail" condenses the trail's history into a little over 300 pages, leaving ample room, however, for the dramatic stories, achievements and failures on which the fame of the "great western highway" is built. Despite its richness in detail, Dary's prose is engaging and easily holds the reader's attention (not surprising, given the subject matter). While it certainly helps to have at least a minimal understanding of the described events' general historic context, the author's narration makes up for any bits and pieces that may have slipped the reader's recollection and also adds numerous lesser-known pieces of information, without neglecting to establish the relevant larger historic framework, such as the development of money trade in North America and the Lewis and Clark expedition, and their respective impact on the development of a trade route into Santa Fe. To a substantial extent, the book draws on primary sources: travel accounts and journals, trade invoices, contracts, newspaper articles, government documents, and more; many of them from Dary's own library - the number of illustrations alone bearing the note "Author's Collection" will be hard-pressed to find their equals elsewhere. (No small wonder: Dary reveals in the introduction that his interest in the trail's history goes all the way back to his childhood.) While a few larger maps might have been desirable - those that are provided are somewhat difficult to read - this is no serious shortcoming; the author's considerable descriptive gifts largely make up for the lack of easily decipherable cartographic devices, and the photographs, drawings, sketches, and paintings supplied throughout the book provide ample food for the reader's imagination in fleshing out the stories' narrative core and visualizing their protagonists. Although not reveling in the often bloody details of the trail's history, Dary pulls no punches, neither in his own summary of the events nor in the selected quotes. For example, he concludes the history of the whites' interactions with Indian tribes along the trail with an excerpt from Charles E. Campbell's "Down among the Red Men" (1928), beginning with the unequivocal statement that "[t]he origin of nearly every war with Indians can be traced to some offense on the part of the white man."
The book ends with a detailed glossary, annotations by chapter, as well as a fourteen-page bibliography: for the serious enthusiast, these alone should make its acquisition a virtual no-brainer. But even a first-time visitor to Santa Fe or any of the cities along the famous trail - heck, even an armchair traveler - will find plenty to marvel, agonize over and enjoy here.
Also recommended:
On the Santa Fe Trail
New Mexico: An Illustrated History (Illustrated Histories)
Spain in the Southwest: A Narrative History of Colonial New Mexico, Arizona, Texas, and California
Four Corners: History, Land, and People of the Desert Southwest
The New Encyclopedia of the American West
 Very informative but where are the Maps? April 23, 2003
5 out of 7 found this review helpful
I found this book to be very rewarding and interesting, but not without fault. I found the lack of maps (or the absence of a map with more of the placenames mentioned) in the book to be very annoying - and I confess I got geographically lost at some points. I found the book very well researched and some of the stories and anecdotes very entertaining. In fact, I wished that there could have been room for more traveller's stories within the book. I must say that I got a bit disorientated in the middel of the book but it came together well. The additon of many photographs (rare in a book of this type) was a fantasic bonus and really added to the enjoyment of the book. Overall a highly entertaining and educational book but would have been so much better with the addition of more detailed maps.
 A Trail to Nowhere January 26, 2003
5 out of 7 found this review helpful
Life on the Santa Fe Trail was no doubt dramatic and colorful, but you would not know it from this book. More than 300 pages of stitched together factual recitations and short anecdotes, the narrative lacks any central characters, themes, or ideas. None of the individuals featured in the book survives more than a few pages, and just as a story starts to draw in the reader, it ends, only to be followed by another quite similar episode, and another and another. Great events dominate the times, but the book seems to separate life on the trail from those events, making the trail itself seem to be almost boring, which it surely was not. The largest contribution this book can hope to make is to point another writer to promising source material with which to bring the story of this trail to life.
Captivating January 24, 2003
6 out of 6 found this review helpful
An absorbing, compelling and very readable account on the history of the Sante Fe Trail. From the early beginnings of 1500's Spanish exploration and the founding of Sante Fe by Juan de Onate in 1610, Dary takes the reader through five centuries of the magic and mystique of the Trail. Relationships, many times hostile, between the Spanish, Indians and Americans are very well documented in this descriptive chronology along with tensions between Mexico and the U.S., influences of the Civil War and the railroads, etc. all having significant ramifications on commerce between the two nations. An excellent book and very well researched.
|
|
|
Wildlife, nature and the Environment
Sponsored Links
Learn how to get your own Amazon Book shop | |
|
