Such a commerce, even in its modest beginnings, could not escape the public eye. The patron of the West came early to its aid. Senator Thomas Hart Benton had taken his seat from the new state of Missouri just in time to notice and report upon the traffic. No public man was more confirmed in his friendship for the frontier trade than Senator Benton. The fur companies found him always on hand to get them favors or to "turn aside the whip of calamity." Because of his influence his son-in-law, Frémont, twenty years later, explored the wilderness. Now, in 1824, he was prompt to demand encouragement. A large policy in the building of public roads had been accepted by Congress in this year. In the following winter Senator Benton's bill provided $30,000 to mark and build a wagon road from Missouri to the United States border on the Arkansas. The earliest travellers over the road reported some annoyance from the Indians, whose hungry, curious, greedy bands would hang around their camps to beg and steal. In the Osage and Kansa treaties of 1825 these tribes agreed to let the traders traverse the country in peace. Indian treaties were not sufficient to protect the Santa Fé trade. The long journey from the fringe of settlement to the Spanish towns eight hundred miles southwest traversed both American and Mexican soil, crossing the international boundary on the Arkansas near the hundredth meridian. The Indians of the route knew no national lines, and found a convenient refuge against pursuers from either nation in crossing the border. There was no military protection to the frontier at the American end of the trail until in 1827 the war department erected a new post on the Missouri, above the Kansas, calling it Fort Leavenworth. Here a few regular troops were stationed to guard the border and protect the traders. The post was due as much to the new Indian concentration policy as to the Santa Fé trade. Its significance was double. Yet no one seems to have foreseen that the development of the trade through the Indian Country might prevent the accomplishment of Monroe's ideal of an Indian frontier.