As to the distances and the direction of the ancient trail, we may consider it as starting at the old Western town of Independence, on the Missouri River, and extending properly no farther than the town of Santa Fé, in New Mexico. Many traders went on down into Old Mexico, as far as Chihuahua, which city so many of the first adventurers knew against their will. We have heard of Kit Carson, as a teamster, as far to the south as Chihuahua, and know that in 1828 he hired out there to Robert McKnight, one of the long-time prisoners in that city, later prominently identified with the history of the trail. Different Missouri towns outfitted parties for the trading to the Southwest, among these prominently St. Louis, and the less important point of Franklin. We may consider the Missouri River as our frontier at this epoch, and find most of our traders among those who lived near the border or were concerned in business ventures in that neighborhood. Assuredly this talk of the Santa Fé trade was the first Western bee in the Kit Carson bonnet, while he was yet a boy in Missouri.
The course of the old trail was astonishingly direct. It left little to be gained in distance saving, or in the essential qualities of grass and water, except along the cut-off over the Cimarron desert, which the travelers would not forego. The first section of the trail, that from Independence to Council Grove, the place where the wagon trains usually organized and went into semi-military formation, was over a pleasant, safe and easy country, a distance of one hundred and forty-three miles, according to Gregg.
Thence the next stage was to the Great Bend of the Arkansas, in the line of such modern towns as Galva, McPherson and Great Bend, although probably it touched the Arkansas at the top of the bend, near the village of Ellinwood, the first railway station east of Great Bend. This lies in a region now tamed into a wheat country and settled with contented farmers, raising crops that have, by the education of the years themselves, grown fit to endure that high, dry air, on the edge of the once rainless region. It was two hundred and seventy miles out to the Bend of the Arkansas, and two hundred and ninety-three miles to the noted Pawnee Rock, which to-day has a town named for it. Not crossing the Arkansas as yet, the trail kept down the western leg of the Great Bend, passed the islands known as the Caches, kept up-stream for a time to a point twenty miles west of the town now known as Dodge City--the same "Dodge" so famous in the cattle days--and reached then the ford of the Arkansas, which Gregg says was three hundred and eighty-seven miles west of Independence.[35]