The Santa Fe Trail

By Michelle Shocklee

Growing up in Santa Fe, New Mexico, I heard much about the Santa Fe Trail. Each time my family climbed into our station wagon to visit my grandparents in eastern New Mexico, our journey took us, in part, along the old Santa Fe Trail. Spanning 1,200 miles and crossing five states, the Santa Fe Trail began in Franklin, Missouri, and ended at the now-famed plaza in downtown Santa Fe. Near Fort Dodge, Kansas, the trail split, offering travelers the choice of taking either the Mountain Branch or the Cimarron Cutoff. Both routes had its problems and dangers, depending on the weather and the time of year. I often wondered who those early pioneers were and why they would risk life and limb to travel in covered wagons, leaving ruts in the ground that are still visible all these years later.

In To Heal Thy Heart, my novella in the recently released The Mail-Order Brides Collection, Phoebe Wagner, our heroine, travels from Kansas City to Santa Fe and then into northern New Mexico to meet her mail-order groom. Although I don't include her journey in the story, I did spend considerable time imagining everything Phoebe would have experienced upon leaving Kansas City to embark on the dusty 700+ mile trip that would take her over the Santa Fe Trail. 

Wagon ruts on the Santa Fe Trail in Kansas

By 1866, the year Phoebe leaves Kansas City, a stagecoach could make the trip on the well-traveled

road in approximately two weeks. But when the trail first opened in 1821, it took two months or more, depending on the type of wagon and animals used, as well as the amount of freight, goods, personal belongings, weather, and unforeseen delays such as illness or even Indian attacks. Phoebe's journey, although long, dusty, and exhausting, was much easier than those early travelers who took to the trail, headed to a land that was still owned by Mexico.

In September 1821, William Becknell and five of his associates struck out from Franklin, MO, and started west. While we'd like to imagine Becknell as an insightful trailblazer, the truth is a little less heroic. Becknell, known as the Father of the Santa Fe Trail, was deep in debt and needed money. His timing, however, couldn't have been more perfect. Mexico had just declared its independence from Spain, and the residents of Santa Fe were eager to purchase the variety of goods Becknell brought in on pack horses upon reaching the mountain village on November 16. His second trip was even more profitable. Bringing with him an estimated $3,000 worth of goods, the Becknell party returned to Missouri with a whopping $91,000. In 1825, he helped surveyors hired by Congress map out the route, opening the Santa Fe Trail to any and all who had the courage to travel its length.

Harriet Bidwell Shaw was one such person. The wife of a Baptist missionary, she and her husband traveled across the Santa Fe Trail in 1861. She chronicled their journey in a diary, which is pure gold to a history lover like me. Her telling of one night on the trial made me smile:

"Milton gathered some sticks and made our tea while I prepared our bed in the carriage and committing ourselves to the care of our Heavenly Father felt safe and tried to sleep but could not much on account of mosquitoes which annoyed me constantly."

Harriet, as well as other pioneers, wrote of dust, trouble with Indians, animals dying, broken wagon axles, storms, buffalo hunts, and cooking over campfires. She never seems to wallow in her circumstances, but one of her disappointments was traveling on Sunday's. "No Sabbath for us," she wrote several times. She described seeing thousands of buffalo "scampering over the plains in all directions" as well as wolves.

"It was a beautiful moonlight evening & [Milton] felt very much in a hunting mood as wolves were very thick – I protested against it but he felt so much inclined to go that he took his gun and went off – saying that he would not be gone long – I felt very uneasy about him – but he soon returned, his hunting mood I suppose having left him after leaving the train. During the evening a large white wolf came to appear very near but distances are very deceiving on the plains & as soon as M shot [at him he ran off.]"

From 1821 until 1880, when the railroad reached Santa Fe on February 9, people from all walks of life, including many emigrants, traversed the Santa Fe Trail. Although the reasons for trekking over the long, dusty Trail were varied -- trading, seeking land, or, like Phoebe, seeking love -- I believe those early pioneers all possessed something in common: the spirit of adventure. I get a sense of it every time I drive down Interstate 25, a highway that used to be little more than a dirt path, gazing at the same mountains, hills, and plains they would have seen as they sought a new life in a new land. 

Michelle Shocklee is an award-winning author of The Planter's Daughter and The Widow of Rose Hill, the first two books in the historical romance series The Women of Rose Hill. Her historical novella, To Heal Thy Heart, is included in The Mail-Order Brides Collection. She's been married to her college sweetheart for more than 30 years and makes her home in Tennessee. Connect with her at www.MichelleShocklee.com.

Locust invasion and US Army aid

Cara Grandle here.

Have you ever read a western, settlers or pioneer novel where a major environmental catastrophe was involved? Floods, fires, blizzards? How about locusts? Over the next few posts I’m going to talk about interesting historical facts behind several of these obstacles.

Starting with locusts.

Locust storm wipe out everything. Crops. Food. Wood. Even the wool off the sheep’s back. They were a serious threat to survival. An invading swarm could mean starvation for all around.

Where should we begin?

How about finding out the difference between a grasshopper and a locust?

Quoting the Encyclopedia of Animal Behavior contributor, Alexandre Bsevolo Latchininsky, Entomologist says, “All locusts are grasshoppers but not all grasshoppers are locusts. Out of 12,000 described grasshopper species in the world, only about a dozen should be considered locusts.”

Phew. Only a dozen. Which after we figure out what defines a locust you will be as grateful as I am that only 12 of 12,000 behave this way:

• Dreaded and destructive. 
• Like a firestorm. 
• Travel on the winds. 7 mph. Looks like a dust cloud. Desert locust covers huge area. 
• Wings crackling. Thrumb-humbing buzzing. 
• Scientists don’t know how the insects choose to land. Maybe color…the green of food looks like a McDonalds stop. They eat everything. One woman reported wearing a dress of white with green stripes. The locusts settled on her and ate every bit of the green stripe in the dress before anything could be done about it.
• Locusts are three inches long, weigh one ounce, and eats its body weight in one day. 
• Locusts respond different than grasshoppers to crowding. It changes color. From russet browns to yellow and black. Then it eats a belly full of poison plants, so if a predator eats him it will not eat another. The head changes shape. They band. After they eat all the local food, they swarm. 
• The swarm is able to eat up to 200 tons of vegetation in a single day.
• Locusts swarms have been recorded on every continent accept Antarctica.
• Locusts outbreaks happened on a small scale every 3-5 years, with a major infestation every 6-8 years. 

Libya, June 2012, 2 million people starved to death after a locust infestation that could have been prevented with infestation control. A political move by a now deceased leader led to this tragedy.


Utah, July 1847, A swarm of Mormon Crickets, a wingless desert locust three times the size of a regular desert locust, marched by the millions clearing 10,000 acres of crops. Cannibals, they march to keep from getting eaten by the locust behind them. The swarm lasted for three weeks.


Rocky Mountains, June 1875, the sun was blocked for five days as the land was infested with Rocky Mountain Locusts. Named Albert’s Storm. Albert Child was a county judge and a weather watcher who measured the swarm with his weather tools. He determined that the swarm was 100 miles wide, 1,800 miles long, and 1.5 miles high, containing 3.5 trillion locusts covering 198,000 miles. 300 thousand acres destroyed.
As the weather cooled the swarms would collect on the railroad tracks to absorb the heat of the sun by day and retain it well into the night. They wouldn’t get out of the way of the train, creating a slippery gooey mess that made train passage precarious.


Famine. Death by starvation. 

Survival facts:

Farmers tried all sorts of things to scare the insects away. They built trenches and filled them with fire only to have the grasshoppers smother the fires. One survival tactics was to eat the locust. Many pulled the legs and wings and fried them in butter to stay alive.

Only 1 in 10 families were left with enough provisions to last out the winter. Kansas alone lost one third of its population. Folks abandoned their stakes and return to the east, slowing The Oregon Trail flood by 20 percent. 

 

Where is the hope in such news?

People are resilient. People do great things.

Hope:

The first ever organized relief effort preformed by the US Army was in answer to this locust invasion.
During that terrible winter, soldiers distributed thousands of heavy coats, boots, shoes, woolen blanket and nearly 2 million rations to suffering families in Minnesota, Iowa, Nebraska, Kansas, Colorado Territory and Dakota Territory. More importantly, it gave the Army a beginning experience with this type of aid.


Add more hope:
The eggs from this massive storm hatched and were frozen out by an early winter storm and the people passed The Grasshopper Act which made it mandatory for able-bodied men to work for at least 2 days during hatch season to eliminate locust larva or be fined $10.00. On top of that, they offered a bounty of $1.00 a bushel for locust's larva collected. By the 1880s they had recovered enough to resume exports. Some switched to winter crops that could be harvested before the larva hatched.


And the final hope:
The Rocky Mountain Locust is now considered extinct. The last sighting was in 1902 in Canada. The reason they are extinct is still considered a mystery.

With all this crazy, it’s amazing to me that there aren’t more stories of locust invasion in pioneer, western, and settler stories. Hmmmmm. Book idea anyone?

Have you ever experienced any sort of insect invasion? I'd love to hear from you.

If you've made it this far, I'd like to tell you about something new. I started a podcast. Home for writers, readers and regular Joes. If you are a podcast listener and you need a dose of joy-meets-common sense come on over to Life Caraphrased. 

CaraGrandle is a Historical Romance Novelist who prefers to write about the early settlers of the Pacific Northwest. Think trappers and loggers and scroungy-backed woodsmen. She is represented by the Steve Laube Agency. Cara leads the author4TheAuthor writers group on Facebook, home to 190 writers. Together they're pressing back on busy and making a space for their dreams. 

Cara is currently out on submission. Follower her journey on her Facebook author page.

Prayers much appreciated. Smile.

Pioneers, Fun, and Games

--A footnote from history by Stephanie Grace Whitson

Mention the word "pioneer," and most of use envision men and sun-bonneted women, covered wagons and log cabins or sod houses. We think of 

hardy souls braving hostile environments and facing untold challenges with near-mythic grit and gumption. 

Our imaginations swirl with visions of horse-drawn plows and kerosene lamps and, if we're really honest, we don't really think we'd want to go back to those "good old days," because we know they were really ... terrible.

Then again ... were they? 
I love this photograph of a homesteading family. I imagine the guy in the center providing music for church socials and barn dances.

Some references to FUN in the pioneers' own words:

"In the winter time, no matter how cold the weather, we would bundle up and climb into the straw-filled lumber wagon, with plenty of quilts and blankets and drive to Uncle Will's. . . He lived in a sod house and his two sisters, Laura and Lydia kept house for him. Lydia played the violin and could dance and jig with the best of them. Will and Steve and Lydia played for dances and I used to 'chord' for them on the organ some times."

Here's a photograph I took at a museum of a portable organ. Who knew such a thing existed! 

"There were only ten women and forty men and we danced all night, and the men nearly danced us women to death."

" ... at a Calico Ball, the lady made a calico dress and a necktie to match it. The men were given a bunch of neckties and asked to choose one without seeing the lady whose dress it matched. In this way, original partners were selected."

Sod house homeowners lucky enough to have a wood floor would sometimes put all the furniture outside to make room for dances. Apparently it wasn't unusual for someone to play the prank wherein babies asleep on a bed were re-bundled and, in the wee hours of the morning when the dance broke up, mothers simply took up the familiar blanket (who would have thought to check to see if the baby was the right one?!) ... and at some point on the way home or the next morning discovered they had the wrong baby! The anecdote I read about this incident closed with the line, "it was two weeks before the neighbors got all the babies traded back." I could almost hear the story-teller laughing.

Friendships were forged during those days that lasted a lifetime. I love the mental image drawn by this account of how a friendship began:

"George and I precipitated an acquaintance with Dr. and Mrs. Purdum ... they lived in a dugout with a sod roof on which grew tall sunflowers and through which they thrust their stovepipe and in driving one Sunday afternoon we drove upon the roof and our pony stepped through before we knew we were on their dugout. A profound apology cemented our friendship."

Maggie Oblinger Sandon remembered, "Winter evening we would play Authors or Dominoes or Checkers. Dominoes were home-made out of an empty soda box, cut them out and do our own marking of the dots. . . Authors were our delight and it taught us so many of the old-time authors and what books they had written. . . . "

Sunday drives and calico balls ... dances no matter the weather ... Authors and Dominoes and Checkers ... and a mention that "twenty miles isn't so far to drive" all remind me that while twenty-first century life may be stressful, there's value in taking time to have a little fun, too.

___________________________

Stephanie Whitson's latest book takes readers back to the days of the Pony Express. The book is only $3.99! Learn more here: https://www.amazon.com/Messenger-Moonlight-Stephanie-Grace-Whitson/dp/1455529087