After the exploration by Captain Meriwether Lewis and his friend Lieutenant Clark, the fur-hunters were the Americans who opened the trails into the country of the Sioux, the Arikaras, the Blackfeet, the Crows and all. They did not make permanent homes; they built only rude forts, as store-houses, and when outside lived in camps like Indian camps. They did not till the ground. When they left, the country was about the same as before, given up to the wild men and the wild animals. This, during fifty years, was the principal use made of the Missouri River portion of the Louisiana Territory, in the northwest. And in the southwest portion little more was done, but the American merchants were the ones who opened that. Young Lieutenant Zebulon Montgomery Pike first explored it, sent out by the commander-in-chief of the army, in 1806, while Lewis and Clark were still homeward bound from the other direction. He traveled up the Arkansas River and into the Rocky Mountains of Colorado, and landed as a prisoner in Santa Fe of New Mexico. The news that he brought back, of New Mexico and the way to get there (an easier way than his own round-about tour) encouraged the merchants and capitalists of St. Louis to hope that a trading route, back and forth, might be opened with Mexico. Calico, cotton, shoes, tobacco, trinkets and the like were to be sold for gold and silver, or exchanged for buffalo-robes, beaver-furs, blankets, and wool--all at one hundred per cent, profit over the original cost. Mexico manufactured very little, and was eager for American goods. As the result, through the country of the Kiowas and the Comanches there was opened the great Santa Fe Trail of the merchants and traders. From the Missouri River at the Kansas border it struck out into present central Kansas, headed southwest to the Arkansas River, and passing on across the desert into northeastern New Mexico arrived at old Santa Fe, seven hundred and seventy miles. The other great national trail, the Oregon Trail of the fur-hunters, was long a pack trail, until the wagons of the emigrants and gold-seekers to California began to throng it. The Santa Fe Trail soon became mainly a wagon trail, for the Santa Fe caravans. From the Missouri River the traders set out, twenty, thirty, forty wagons in a train--huge canvas-covered Conestogas, thirty feet in length with boxes six feet in depth, carrying three tons of freight and drawn by eight span of oxen or mules. From the lead span's noses to the end-gate of the wagon the length over all was thirty yards. These Santa Fe wagons were not prairie schooners; they were prairie frigates. Thus they lumbered on, at not better than fifteen miles a day; and during their fifty or sixty days' trips out, loaded, and their forty days' trips back, partly empty, the Kiowas and Comanches, the storms and the hot dry desert, saw to it that they did not have easy sailing.