Among those to go out early into the unknown Southwest, after Lieutenant Pike had told us some few things regarding the pueblos of old Spain among the mountains of the Rockies, were the fur trader Phillibert, and the traders Chouteau and De Munn, of St. Louis, who bought out Phillibert’s goods and men in the Rockies. Phillibert had planned a rendezvous on Huerfano Creek. This was in 1815, the year following that in which Phillibert had made his first trip into that Western region. These St. Louis men met the officials of Santa Fé, and were warned out of the country. Naïvely, since they could not trade in New Mexico, they started for the Columbia River, by way of the high mountains of Colorado; and the mountains, of course, stopped them. They fell back on the Arkansas, were caught by the Spaniards, had their goods confiscated, and so lost three years of time as well. Not even this pointed advice as to Spanish preferences served to hold back the west-bound men, and no doubt they sent out some party for Santa Fé every year thereafter, until they had their way, and until the Anglo-Saxon grasp was fixed upon that sleepy old Southwest, which lay winking in the sun a couple of centuries belated by the way. The Spaniards were suspicious, as are ever the slothful, and they made a practice of imprisoning the whites that got down into their country. They imprisoned Pike, they imprisoned Merriwether, an intrepid trader who reached that country in 1819; and history tells us how, in 1812, they imprisoned the first party of the white traders to venture into New Mexico after the return of Lieutenant Pike, the twelve men who made up the party of Baird, McKnight and Chambers, commonly called the party of McKnight, Beard and Chambers. This gallant little company they kept in the fearsome penitentiary at Chihuahua for nine long and weary years,—a fate terrible enough, one would certainly think, to warn away all other adventurers from a neighborhood so hostile. As to this first and most unfortunate of the early trading expeditions to the Southwest, that of Baird, McKnight and Chambers, there is first-hand information in the form of a personal letter from J. M. Baird, of Louisville, Kentucky, a grandson of the early trader that helped to lead the way of commerce across the plains. Mr. Baird writes: