Technical World Magazine

A
FRESH TRAIL TO SANTA FE
By
HARRY F. ROHR
is 106 years now since one La
Lande, an adventurer for a St. Louis
ITfur trader, drove away from the
banks of the Mississippi toward the
setting' sun witli the ancient City of
the Holy Faith as his goal. It was he
who blazed across the trackless prairies
that wonderful highway that lives in history,
romance and adventure as the Santa
Fe Trail.
Without so much as a map to guide
him, La Lande laid out one of the finest
natural roads the world has ever known,
over which, until the railroads came and
l)uilt beside it. flowed the commerce of
half a continent. After him followed the
sturdy ]Monecrs. who pushed across the
])lains and into the foothills of the
Rockies the thin wedge of civilization
that split asunder the myth of the Great
American Desert and made the Great
Plains the wheat belt of the Union.
The story of the Santa Fe Trail is the
stor}' of the West—that vast, mysterious
West of h.istory and of fiction, that wide
and breezy West of today ; that West of
wagon trains and Indian raids, of buffaloes
and sod houses, of cattle trails and
cowboys ; that West of broad fields and
country mansions, of motor cars and
memories.
There still live in the West men who
knew the old Santa Fc Trail in the days
of its glory when
mile - long wagon
dragged
trains
slowly over hill and
plain. The prairie
schooner of that
day has given way
to the motor car of
cV^
t h i s. the b u 1 1-
whacker has become
a chaulii'eur.
and tlie old trail 'Jhi-; Kduti- kv THI-; Ni;w Tkaii. to Sam a I'lhas
become the new — the Xew
Santa Fc Trail,—a motor speedway from
the bank of the l*'ather of Waters to th?
Plaza of Santa Fe. Over the old trail,
these pioneers and their .sons are .spreading
a boulevard one thousand five hundred
miles long.
It is not merely a project, this Xew
Santa Fe Trail. It is a solid actuality,
which four states are pushing to completion,
\vith Kansas and Colorado well
in advance. The "whereas" and "be it
resolved" .stage has long been passed and
the oratory has given way to the crunch
of the .steam grader.
The Xew Santa he
Trail is practically finished between
Hutchinson, Kansas, and Canyon City,
Colorado, at which latter place one
branch ends. It is being pushed south
from La Junta to Santa Fe and east from
Hutchinson to Kansas City and St.
Louis.
Founded in sentiment, the real incentive
behind the Xew Santa Fe Trail
was the big red touring car. Times
change and men with them. So long as
the old "double rig" was good enough
even a mark of wealth— for the western
Kansas farmer, he took little interest in
good roads. Then along came alfalfa and
the days of dollar wheat and regular
crops and with them the motor car. It
was a change in
the times and the farmer
changed with them.
With his mortgages
])aid off, a fine, big
mansion where his
old sod house had
once stood, money
in the liank and his
sons and daughters
getting college educations,
the farmer
began to look at
things differertlv.