The way from Santa Fé to California seems to have been well known, but the trade did not dare to attempt a commerce so distant, and so unprofitable as it must have been, consumed by such necessarily heavy transportation charges. We speak of the Santa Fé trail as one of the great Western highways, but it was a halting and broken and arrested highway. It was not yet quite time for the straight leap across the rivers. The trail clung to the rivers as far as it might, and the attempts to cut loose from the streams, and go straight across from the Red River to Chihuahua, proved to be unprofitable or impracticable. The total amount of merchandise carried in these picturesque caravans of the prairies was perhaps not so great as we should imagine, though we must remember that a dollar was larger then than it is to-day. The extent of the trade varied from year to year, and did not regularly increase; for though we note one caravan in 1831 taking out two hundred thousand dollars’ worth of goods, we find that in 1841, ten years later, the whole annual trade was but one hundred and fifty thousand dollars. The climax was in 1843, when goods to the value of four hundred and fifty thousand dollars were transported. The pay for this came back partly in specie, partly in furs, sometimes largely in horses and mules, the trade thus bearing a double profit and a double risk. The Indians did not care for gold or silver so much as they did for horses and mules, and diligent enough were their efforts to stampede the live stock of the traders. Upon occasion the United States Army was asked to escort a caravan, but this aid was not generally to be expected, especially since the worst part of the route, that infested by the Comanches, lay west of the then accepted western border of the United States. The average value of the trade was about one hundred and fifty thousand dollars yearly, and the total sum for the duration of this strange branch of American commerce was only about three million dollars. The goods carried were at first largely prints and drillings, for the Mexicans got such goods from Vera Cruz on the coast, and only at great expense. Later silks, velvets, hardware and the general line of American goods began its first westward way across the American borders. Sometimes the stocks were retailed, sometimes sold at wholesale, the latter more often when the trader was in a hurry. It was a wild, peculiar and fascinating sort of commerce, and strong was the hold it naturally took upon the people of the Western border.