Santa Fe Trail, Part 4: The pain of Native life on the trail

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James Riding In doesn’t pull punches about the impact the Santa Fe Trail had on Native American communities. “It was devastating,” said the recently retired professor and co-founder of the American Indian Studies program at Arizona State University. For American merchants crossing the trail from its start in Missouri to its end in Santa Fe, the trail offered profit and promise. For Native Americans, it meant buffalo corpses, played-out beaver streams, conflict, disease — and often, death.

It’s a story few modern day historians seem to be telling when reviewing the history of the trail, Riding In said. It’s why he put together a nearly 750-page study, “American Indians and the Santa Fe Trail,” in 2009 for the National Park Service. Modern history seems to have wiped out the Native American point of view. Riding In’s report includes a lengthy list of historically reported accounts of encounters between traders and members of various tribal entities along the 800- to 900-mile trail, which ran from 1821 to 1880.

According to Riding In’s research, the trail cut through land belonging to at least a dozen distinct Indian nations, including the Osages, Pawnees, Comanches, Kiowas, Plains or Kiowa Apaches, Utes, Jicarilla Apaches and Pecos Pueblo.

While noting not all interaction between the travelers and the Native people was hostile, Riding In said more often than not the treaties led to Native Americans being “put on lands unfit for white civilization to settle.” Meanwhile, the caravan members often killed buffalo for sport, decimating the herds. And they sometimes brought illness and disease with them, said State Historian Rob Martinez.

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