In August of 1864 the scenery along the route from Kansas City, Missouri, to Santa Fe, New Mexico, was grand. Kansas City at that time was a very small place. Its inhabitants may have numbered two or three thousand. Santa Fe with its narrow streets looking like alleys was built mostly of doby (mud bricks). Crowded up against the mountains, at the end of a little valley, through which runs a tributary to the Rio Grande, boasted of healthful climate. Santa Fe had a public square in the center, a house known as "the Palace." There were numerous gambling houses there and these gambling houses were considered as respectable as the merchants' store houses. The business of the place was considerable, many of the merchants being wholesale dealers for the vast territory tributary. In the money market there were no pennies,--nothing less than five-cent pieces. The old palace about which I have called your attention is an old land mark of Santa Fe and is to Santa Fe what "The Alamo" is to Texas. The postoffice at that time was a small building, 14x24, with a partition in the center. It was one-story with a dirt roof, as were all the houses of that old Spanish city at the time my narrative opens. On my first trip from Santa Fe to Kansas City in 1864 there was little to note except that when I got up on the Raton mountain about thirty miles from Trinidad, Colorado, Uncle Dick Wooten had a large force of Mexicans building a toll road. Originally the road was almost impassable. Saddle horses and pack mules could get over the narrow rock-ribbed pass and around what was known as the "devil's gate," but it was next to impossible for the stages and other caravans to get to Trinidad. This was the natural highway to southwestern Colorado and northwestern New Mexico. Uncle Dick was a man of considerable forethought and it occurred to him that he might make some money if he bought a few pounds of dynamite and blasted the rock at "the Devil's Gate" and hewed out a good road, which, barring grades, should be as good as the average turnpike. He expected of course to keep the roads in good repair at his own expense and succeeded in getting the legislatures of Colorado and New Mexico to grant him a charter covering the rights and privileges of his projected toll road or turnpike. In the spring of 1865 Uncle Tom built him a tolerably pretentious home on the top of the mountains--the house on one side of the road and the stables on the other and swung a gate across the road from the house to the stables. I believe some historians say that Uncle Dick Wooten continued to live at this place until the year of 1895, the date of his death. But as to the veracity of this assertion I will not vouch.