Since we have declared ourselves to be less interested in bald chronology than in the naturally connected causes of events which make chronology worth while, we may now, perhaps, double back upon the path of chronology, and take up the great early highways of the West--what we might call the points of attack against the frontier. The story of the Santa Fe Trail, now passing into oblivion, once was on the tongue of every man. This old highroad in its heyday presented the most romantic and appealing features of the earlier frontier life. The Santa Fe Trail was the great path of commerce between our frontier and the Spanish towns trading through Santa Fe. This commerce began in 1822, when about threescore men shipped certain goods across the lower Plains by pack-animals. By 1826 it was employing a hundred men and was using wagons and mules. In 1830, when oxen first were used on the trail, the trade amounted to $120,000 annually; and by 1843, when the Spanish ports were closed, it had reached the value of $450,000, involving the use of 230 wagons and 350 men. It was this great wagon trail which first brought us into touch with the Spanish civilization of the Southwest. Its commercial totals do not bulk large today, but the old trail itself was a thing titanic in its historic value. This was the day not of water but of land transport; yet the wheeled vehicles which passed out into the West as common carriers of civilization clung to the river valleys--natural highways and natural resting places of home-building man. This has been the story of the advance of civilization from the first movements of the world's peoples. The valleys are the cleats of civilization's golden sluices. There lay the great valley of the Arkansas, offering food and water, an easy grade and a direct course reaching out into the West, even to the edge of the lands of Spain; and here stood wheeled vehicles able to traverse it and to carry drygoods and hardware, and especially domestic cotton fabrics, which formed the great staple of a "Santa Fe assortment." The people of the Middle West were now, in short, able to feed and clothe themselves and to offer a little of their surplus merchandise to some one else in sale. They had begun to export! Out yonder, in a strange and unknown land, lay one of the original markets of America! On the heels of Lewis and Clark, who had just explored the Missouri River route to the Northwest, Captain Zebulon Pike of the Army, long before the first wheeled traffic started West, had employed this valley of the Arkansas in his search for the southwestern delimitations of the United States. Pike thought he had found the head of the Red River when after a toilsome and dangerous march he reached the headwaters of the Rio Grande. But it was not our river. It belonged to Spain, as he learned to his sorrow, when he marched all the way to Chihuahua in old Mexico and lay there during certain weary months.