The other overland trail, and the greatest of all American roads, if we measure length and importance as well, was the ancient Oregon trail up the Platte, over the South Pass and down the Columbia; a trail forgotten by most of the young men of to-day, and existing no more to terrify the young women whom young men marry, as they did in the times of our fathers, when moving West meant tearing out the heart. As to the theory of straight lines, Lieutenant Pike tells us that the first men to reach Santa Fé did not go straight westward, but also wandered up the aboriginal highway of the Platte valley, over what was later to be the course of the Oregon trail, turning to the southward when far up the stream, and following the South Fork of the Platte down into the Rockies, which would bring the traveler within wilderness-touch of the Spanish settlements. La Lande, the perfidious trader, who so sadly left in the lurch his patron, the merchant Morrison of Kaskaskia, and took up his permanent abode in Santa Fé, is thought to have reached that city, in the year 1804, by this route; and it is known that James Purcell (or James Pursley, as Pike has the spelling) was directed to Santa Fé in the year 1805 by some Indians whom he met on the upper Platte. This route by the Platte was not, however, either the permanent or the original one. Indeed, the first expedition between the Spanish and the American settlements came, strangely enough, from the west, and not from the east, and was undertaken by the Spaniards as early as 1720. Then, in 1739, the Mallet brothers, Frenchmen from the settlements along the Mississippi, started for New Mexico by the strange route of the upper Missouri River, getting far up into the big bend of the Missouri before they discovered that they were going quite the wrong way! Their belief that the Spanish settlements could be reached by way of the head streams of the Missouri is strange confirmation of our doctrine that early traveling man ever clung to the waterways. The river—it would lead anywhere! The Mallet party returned in 1740, some of them by way of the Arkansas River, which presently brought them out at New Orleans! We may therefore discover that neither the Missouri nor the Platte could have been called the accepted highway into the lower West at the time Lieutenant Pike set out to find the headwaters of the Red River. There is a shrewd doubt as to Pike’s innocence in getting over on the head of the Rio Grande instead of the Red River. It was at least a lucky mistake; and his captivity among the Spaniards was productive of very good results to the United States later on, one of its most important results being his suggesting the route along the Arkansas, instead of the Platte, for the west-bound travelers. It was strong-legged, stout-hearted Zebulon who told of the profits of the possible Spanish trade, and credit is usually given him for first outlining the historic trail along the Arkansas.