Along the Santa Fe Trail

by Marc Simmons

The Santa Fe Trail was one of the most important overland trade routes in the nineteenth century. For nearly sixty years, from 1822 to 1880, it carried traders, army troops, and pioneers west from... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0826308821
• ISBN13: 9780826308825
• Release Date: January 1986
• Publisher: University of New Mexico Press
• Length: 184 Pages
• Weight: 1.50 lbs.

Customer Reviews

Something of an elegy

I live in a canyon off the Santa Fe Trail, about six miles from the Plaza in the center of Santa Fe, New Mexico, which of course was the end of the Santa Fe Trail. Local lore is that it was at a barber's establishment in our canyon that many wagon caravans would stop for the teamsters and merchants to bathe and have their hair cut so that they would be relatively neat and clean upon their arrival at Trail's end. Hence, for me the Santa Fe Trail is of special interest. It also exerts a strong attraction for many Americans as one of the more romantic features of our nation's history, its expansion westward. ALONG THE SANTA FE TRAIL, by Joan Myers and Marc Simmons, is one of the better books dealing with the Santa Fe Trail that I have found. Marc Simmons is currently the preeminent local historian of matters New Mexico. His contribution to the book is an eighty-page text that mixes history with an account of his own travels along the Trail from Franklin, Missouri to Santa Fe back in the early 1980s. Some of the writing is quite good, but it occasionally tends to be sentimental, even sappy. Still, Simmons does a fine job of conveying the excitement and wonder of travel along the Trail, as well as the significance and uniqueness of the Trail as part of America's westward movement. Although by no means a comprehensive history of the Santa Fe Trail, Simmons' account is an adequate historical overview and it is much more enjoyable to read than David Dary's book ("The Santa Fe Trail"), which I just read and also reviewed. Joan Myers' contribution is about fifty-five black-and-white photographs of places along the trail - such as Boone's Lick, Missouri; Lost Spring and Pawnee Rock, Kansas; Fort Nichols and Inscription Rock, Oklahoma; a dilapidated stage stop in Boggsville, Colorado; and the ruins of a Masonic Temple and a crumbling livery stable in Watrous, New Mexico. Many of the photographs enhance the nostalgic aura of the book. They all were taken in the early 1980s, and I suspect that many of the buildings have now disappeared completely and some of the landscapes have been altered radically. ALONG THE SANTA FE TRAIL was published almost a quarter-century ago, at a time when the physical evidence of the Trail was fast eroding. Now there is even less left. The Trail is almost entirely history, and this fine book is something of an elegy.