from Santa Fé through the Sangre de Cristo Pass to the Arkansaw at Pueblo was well known to the Spaniards when Fowler’s party traversed it in the opposite direction; but we have no American itinerary of that passage at an earlier date than his. When Fowler ascended the Rio Grande to Hot Spring creek in the San Juan range, he followed a Spanish road; but never before had an American expedition been so near the sources of that great river Del Norte, and not till many years afterward did any such prolong Fowler’s traces upward. The greater part of Fowler’s homeward journey from Taos to Fort Osage will doubtless prove as novel to his readers as it was unexpected by his editor. South of the Arkansaw, his trail was neither by the way he had gone before, nor by either of those roads which were soon be established and become well known; for he came neither by the Cimarron nor the Raton route, but took a straighter course than either, between the two, over Chico Rico Mesa and thence along Two Butte creek to the Arkansaw on the Kansan-Coloradan border. Again, when Fowler left the Arkansaw to strike across Kansas, he did not take up the direct route which caravans were about to blaze as the Santa Fé Trail from Missouri through Council Grove to Great Bend; but went a roundabout way, looping far south to heads of the Whitewater and Verdigris rivers before he crossed the Neosho to make for the Missouri below the mouth of the Kansas. This bare outline of the way Fowler went in twice crossing the Plains, to and from the Rocky mountains, suffices to show that, taken as a whole, it was not only the first but also the last such itinerary of which we have any knowledge; for if this route has since been retraversed in its entirety, time has obliterated all sign of such an adventure. Another point is to be scored in connection with Fowler’s unique performance. The date is a critical one in the history of the whole subject. That elusive “Red river” which Pike sought in vain in 1806 was only the year before Fowler found by Long to be the Canadian fork of the Arkansaw, instead of that separate tributary of the Mississippi which Long imagined he was descending till he reached its confluence with the same stream which the other detachment of his party followed down. Just at the time when Long had finished his exploration, and Fowler was leading his people home from their wide wandering, the Santa Fé trade was taking definite shape. Like every other such enterprise, this one went through its tentative stages of hesitancy and disconcert, before its final organization as a regular industry; and if any year can be named as that of complete equipment for the business, it is that of 1822. Fowler was thus a factor in the beginnings of a commerce which grew by what it fed upon to the immense proportions it had acquired when it was checked by the troubles of 1846.