In a rented Toyota, my husband Meade and I left St. Louis on an autumn afternoon and headed west to trace the route of the Santa Fe Trail and follow it home. I kept a brief journal:

Oct. 30, 2009

We got off late, but were able to see Franklin, Missouri, where William Becknell left for Santa Fe in the spring of 1821. He's considered the first trader on the trail. The original Franklin is in the floodplain of the Missouri River and has been washed away. There's not much left of the second Franklin that replaced it, and the third Franklin is a small town. It has a museum that was closed.

A granite monument placed in 1909 by the Daughters of the American Revolution marks the beginning of the trail.

We spent the night across the river in Boonville, at an old hotel, the Frederick, that had been restored two years ago. We had a good dinner in the hotel dining room


Oct. 31

We ate breakfast at a diner across the street from the hotel. At dinner the night before, there were several young couples in the hotel dining room, but the breakfast crowd was mainly older, overweight farmers, many wearing overalls.

The Santa Fe Trail is north of the Missouri River here, but is obliterated by farms. Up until the Civil War, the river was full of barge and steamboat traffic. The railroad succeeded the river and the trail. Today the Katy Railroad line is a bike trail on the north side of the river, and the rail bridge is abandoned. There are some rail lines on the south side of the river, but they are rusty. There is no river traffic. Boonville and Franklin have little commerce, many closed businesses. Activity has moved south to I-70, which is full of trucks.

We drove west to Arrow Rock, where the Santa Fe Trail crossed the Missouri by ferry. A few buildings remain, and the town has kept its historical feel. We visited the museum. We learned that during the Civil War, Missourians could own slaves, but the state didn't leave the Union. There was a lot of guerrilla activity, and life was particularly hard for slaves whose family members had joined the Union army. The original Indians in the area were Osage, but were decimated by disease, then forced to move west.

We walked from town down to the river, through second-growth forest. The area is part of the Big Muddy National Wildlife Refuge. The signs along the path said that at the time Lewis and Clark passed through, the area had enormous hardwood and cottonwood trees, but the beavers had already been trapped out. Today the regrowth trees are spindly. There are deer and beaver, but bears and cougars have been exterminated. The Missouri River is mostly channelized, to allow farming behind the levees.

We ate at Huston Tavern, restored to look as it was in trail days. Not great food, but a beautiful building. Then we peeked in at a display of manual printing presses at the old newspaper offices.

After lunch, we drove along the path of the old trail towards Kansas City. The farmland is very fertile. We looked at Google maps of the area on the iPhone, and saw how all the farms are contour plowed. Signs on fields show what national brand of seeds are used there: Monsanto, and other huge companies. Farm implement stores have tall-wheeled tractors used for spraying herbicides and pesticides. They looked like poisonous evil insects. Agribiz!

As the technology of steamboats improved, freight could travel farther up the Missouri. Independence, and later Westport Landing, replaced Franklin as the head of the trail. My great-grandfather Robert Moody lived in Westport with his brothers, sisters and parents during the Civil War when the family shipped on the Santa Fe Trail. Today, Independence is a suburb of Kansas City. Westport is right in the city. We didn't go there. There was too much traffic.

We ended up for the night in Council Grove, Kansas. This was the last place going west where hardwood was available for repairing wagons. The trail crossed the Neosho River here.

We ate at the Hays Tavern, which was in operation when my great-grandfather Moody came through. We had a great steak. A sign on the wall said that in 1857, some $40 million worth of freight went through town.

After dark, by the light of the full moon, we walked to the Kaw mission where Indian boys were taught to farm. The historic marker said that, in spite of disease and famine, they learned to farm so they could stay on their ancestral land. Nevertheless, they were forced to move out to Oklahoma. The story, even as abbreviated on the signs, is heartbreaking.

We spent the night at a bed and breakfast in the Flint Hills west of Council Grove.

Nov. 1

Our hosts at the Heritage House B&B, Chuck and Cheryl Downes, told us some local history during breakfast. Chuck said that Council Grove was where the Indians signed a treaty to allow travel on the Santa Fe Trail through their lands.

The house where the B&B is was built by a relative in 1903. It was 4,000 square feet and the first in the county to have running water. Farmers plant wheat, milo and soybeans in rotation in their plowed fields. Chuck is letting much of his land go back to grazing: "this ground, you might as well plant in gravel." He said that landowners burn the grass on their property each spring: "Easter weekend, this whole country will be on fire." People from out-of-state don't know not to drive through the smoke, and end up in car wrecks.

Cheryl said locals don't pay much attention to the Santa Fe Trail, more to the Oregon Trail, which also passed through Kansas. She said that years ago, a 4-H leader had children walk on different parts of the Santa Fe Trail during the summer, but that program was discontinued.

We stopped at a sign that pointed to Santa Fe Trail ruts, but couldn't make any out, too much tall grass.

Next stop was the Nature Conservancy's Tall Grass Prairie Preserve. It's not right on the trail, but is one of the few places that were never plowed. The brochure we picked up said prairie once covered 140 million acres in North America. Now it's just a few isolated remnants.

We walked for a couple of hours. The grass was brown and brittle, and it went on forever. We saw hawk flying, and a coyote track, but no signs of the bison that were just reintroduced to the area. A few cottonwoods grow along creek bottoms, and the wind in the dry leaves was very noisy. Santa Fe Trail traders spent months at a time walking through this landscape. I wonder if it grew on them?

I talked to a schoolgirl, Mattie Clark, from Newton, Kansas. She said students study the Santa Fe Trail in their 5th grade state history class. Her class saw videos of the trail, but never visited it. "It seems very far back in time," she said.

We drove west and by the time we got to Pawnee Rock it was almost dark. It was a famous stop in the Santa Fe Trail and is now in a historic park. The park closed at dusk, but we went in anyway and looked at the full moon and the remaining bits of red sunset. Here, Plains tribes left petroglyphs, and Santa Fe Trail Travelers left graffiti, but all that was quarried away to make stone houses in town.

We spent the night at a nondescript chain motel in Larned, Kansas.

Nov. 2

We visited Fort Larned as soon as it opened, and were the only tourists there. It was a cold, windy day. This fort housed the soldiers who protected the Santa Fe Trail from hostile tribes. The place was abandoned when the railroad came. Settlers turned it a ranch headquarters, which preserved it. Now it is a National Park Service site and beautifully restored. We saw the barracks, kitchen, bakery, infirmary, blacksmith shop, infirmary and storehouses. The officers' quarters looked very comfortable. The museum had photos of Indian leaders. Many tried in good faith to work with the U.S. Government, but were killed anyway, or forced to take their people to reservations in Oklahoma. The displays said that some of the worst atrocities against the Plains tribes were carried out by volunteer militias during the chaos of the Civil War.

We ate lunch in Fort Dodge, Kansas, at sandwich shop that advertised sandwiches with whole-grain bread and sprouts. The downtown is mostly deserted, with the only sign of life being some Mexican stores selling boots, western wear and formal dresses for quinceniera celebrations.

West of Dodge are hills covered with wagon ruts, this time a little easier to see than the last ones we looked for. The grass is shorter farther west. At the overlook we met Luis Quiñones, a Guatemalan living in Kansas who was showing the trail to his visiting relatives. He was the only tourist we met on our trip who seemed excited by the Santa Fe Trail. He told us he thinks it is very important for a people to understand its history.

It was dark and we missed the turnoff to Sand Creek where Cheyenne men, women and children were massacred in the 1860s, during one of our country's most horrific attempt at genocide.

We spent the night at a bad Best Western motel in Colorado. A smell of old hamburger grease permeated the frayed carpet.

Nov. 3

The morning was foggy and cold. We arrived at Bent's Fort just as it opened, and were the only tourists there during most of our visit. Outside the fort's adobe walls, mules and oxen like the ones that pulled the Santa Fe Trail wagons, were grazing.

Inside, Park Service employee David Newell was dressed in period outfit. He was happy to visit with us. He told us that the fort was never a military base. In the 1830s William and Charles Bent and Ceran St. Vrain built it on the Mexico/U.S. border. It was a trading center for trappers, Santa Fe Trail merchants, Cheyennes, Arapahos and Kiowas. The fort burned around 1849, and was rebuilt by the Park Service in the 1970s, according to plans drawn up by Lt. Jams Abert who visited when it was an active trading post.

The fort is beautifully furnished. Storerooms are full of buffalo skins, firearms, clothing and other trade goods. We saw a billiard room complete with game table and a bar. Some sleeping rooms had Río Grande blankets hanging from poles above the carved beds. There was chile and garlic in the kitchen. We examined some replicas of Santa Fe Trail wagons. One was very large with wheels up to Meade's chest and a wagon box larger than three pickup truck beds.

After lunch at a steak restaurant in La Junta, we stopped at Iron Spring and saw some ruts and the ruins of a stone stage corral. Cheyennes burned the place in 1864. Today the range is empty.

As we drove through southern Colorado, we could see the Spanish Peaks to the west, covered in snow.

The Raton Pass is at the New Mexico border. It must have days for wagons to cross.

We drove past Wagon Mound in the late afternoon. It is a volcanic hill so named because travelers on the trail thought it looked like a covered wagon. Marc Simmons in his guidebook "Following the Santa Fe Trail" says that in 1850 a war party of Apaches and Utes attacked the mail stagecoach there and killed all the white people traveling with it.

We would have liked to stop at National Park Service sites of Fort Union and Pecos Pueblo, but both were closed for the day.

It was dark when we finally reached Santa Fe. We stopped to take a photo of the Daughters of the American Revolution monument on the southeast corner of the Plaza. I'd never noticed it before.

It took us less than five days to drive the trail that took 19th century traders months to cross. We had learned different the towns at the ends of the trail are from each other-and how indifferent most North Americans we met were to the history of the trail.