As everyone must know, tourism is one of New Mexico's leading and more profitable industries. Looking at its prominence today, most people have difficult time believing that years of promotion were necessary before the New Mexico territory managed to attract enough visitors to affect significantly our local economy.

A few scattered travelers, mainly from the East, came sightseeing in the years right after the Civil War. Often they were making a grand tour of the West and New Mexico was merely one of the stops on the circuit.

Some wrote books about their experiences, extolling the quaint cultures along the upper Rio Grande and the breath-taking landscapes.

At the same time, they tended to criticize the scarcity of comfortable lodgings, the strangeness of the food and the primitive nature of public transportation. All of that was to change, however, during the 1880s.

The transformation was engineered by the vigorous Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe Railway Co., whose subsidiary line reached Las Vegas, N.M., on July 4, 1879, and Santa Fe the following February.

In a bid to foster passenger travel, the company subsequently embarked upon a well-funded marketing campaign to lure Americans to discover the Southwest by train. The success of the effort is vividly related in Victoria E. Dye's detailed book All Aboard for Santa Fe, published by University of New Mexico Press in 2005.

The railroad joined with the soon-to-be famous Fred Harvey to establish fine restaurants and then hotels at trackside. An entirely new concept, it was designed to persuade transcontinental travelers to make a stopover in "primitive" New Mexico and Arizona to soak up the local culture and find adventure.

Writers and artists, having fallen under the region's spell, became allies of the tourism boosters. One of those was Charles F. Lummis, a favorite of mine.

Inspired by the Southwestern desert lands, he wrote a string of popular books, widely read by potential tourists. He also coined the popular slogan "See America First."

By that, Lummis meant that Americans, particularly those from his native Massachusetts, should get to know their own country before taking the standard European tour, as was then common.

In August 1925, the Albuquerque Journal reported that the Santa Fe Railway and Fred Harvey were creating a guided bus detour through the Indian pueblos. The idea was that train passengers heading for California could leave the rails and transfer to buses or open touring cars for a three-day jaunt through the heart of Northern New Mexico.

Highly publicized, the "Indian Detours," as the business was called, found a huge market and rapidly expanded outward. Americans, it seems, were eager to learn of other cultures, particularly since the visiting could now be done in comfort.

The volume of tourist traffic had increased steadily since the opening of the 20th century. The Indian Detours gave it another shot in the arm, even as a new trend in travel began to syphon off railroad passengers.

The growing popularly of the private automobile allowed people from afar to go sightseeing over long distances and tailor the time schedule and route to their own wishes.

An example is offered by New Englanders Winifred and Rollin Dixon and their photographer friend Kathryn Thaxter. In a 1920 journey, described as "frontier motoring," they drove southward through Texas and ascended the Rio Grande from El Paso.

In a book tracing the experience, Mrs. Dixon giddily spoke of the unpaved road. "El Camino Real is the imposing name it bears, suggesting ancient caravans of colonial grandees, and pack-trains bearing treasure from Mexico City to the provincial trading post of Santa Fe."

"That name," she confessed, "gave us a little thrill." And she recorded a detail that I had not encountered before. Signposts, or markers, along the road contained merely two letters, KT, that stood for King's Trail.

"The few people that we met along the way, mostly small farmers plowing their fields, bade us a courteous good day in Spanish." That, Mrs. Dixon interpreted, thusly: "In this land, Mexico spills untidily into the United States."

At Isleta Pueblo, the trio of urbane Easterners saw their very first Indians. Winifred Dixon admitted: "We were not such tenderfeet as to fear violence, scalping, or sudden war-whoops ... but we had no experience in dealing with them."

Her remarks remind us how green early tourists were, and how thick was the romantic lens through which they viewed the Southwest.

Incidentally, the Dixon book, titled Westward Hoboes, was published in New York in 1921, only to sink like a rock, never to be heard of again ... until now!

Historian Marc Simmons is author of numerous books on New Mexico and the Southwest. His column appears Saturdays.