It was Pike's story of the far Southwest that first started the idea of the commerce of the Santa Fe Trail. In that day geography was a human thing, a thing of vital importance to all men. Men did not read the stock markets; they read stories of adventure, tales of men returned from lands out yonder in the West. Heretofore the swarthy Mexicans, folk of the dry plains and hills around the head of the Rio Grande and the Red, had carried their cotton goods and many other small and needful things all the way from Vera Cruz on the seacoast, over trails that were long, tedious, uncertain, and expensive. A far shorter and more natural trade route went west along the Arkansas, which would bring the American goods to the doors of the Spanish settlements. After Pike and one or two others had returned with reports of the country, the possibilities of this trade were clear to any one with the merchant's imagination. There is rivalry for the title of "Father of the Santa Fe Trail." As early as 1812, when the United States was at war with England, a party of men on horseback trading into the West, commonly called the McKnight, Baird, and Chambers party, made their way west to Santa Fe. There, however, they met with disaster. All their goods were confiscated and they themselves lay in Mexican jails for nine years. Eventually the returning survivors of this party told their stories, and those stories, far from chilling, only inflamed the ardor of other adventurous traders. In 1821 more than one American trader reached Santa Fe; and, now that the Spanish yoke had been thrown off by the Mexicans, the goods, instead of being confiscated, were purchased eagerly. It is to be remembered, of course, that trading of this sort to Mexico was not altogether a new thing. Sutlers of the old fur traders and trappers already had found the way to New Spain from the valley of the Platte, south along the eastern edge of the Rockies, through Wyoming and Colorado. By some such route as that at least one trader, a French creole, agent of the firm of Bryant & Morrison at Kaskaskia, had penetrated to the Spanish lands as early as 1804, while Lewis and Clark were still absent in the upper wilderness. Each year the great mountain rendezvous of the trappers--now at Bent's Fort on the Arkansas, now at Horse Creek in Wyoming, now on Green River in Utah, or even farther beyond the mountains--demanded supplies of food and traps and ammunition to enable the hunters to continue their work for another year. Perhaps many of the pack-trains which regularly supplied this shifting mountain market already had traded in the Spanish country.