This route by the Platte was not, however, either the permanent or the original one. Indeed, the first expedition between the Spanish and the American settlements came, strangely enough, from the west, and not from the east, and was undertaken by the Spaniards as early as 1720. Then, in 1739, the Mallet brothers, Frenchmen from the settlements along the Mississippi, started for New Mexico by the strange route of the upper Missouri River, getting far up into the big bend of the Missouri before they discovered that they were going quite the wrong way! Their belief that the Spanish settlements could be reached by way of the head streams of the Missouri is strange confirmation of our doctrine that early traveling man ever clung to the waterways. The river--it would lead anywhere! The Mallet party returned in 1740, some of them by way of the Arkansas River, which presently brought them out at New Orleans!
We may therefore discover that neither the Missouri nor the Platte could have been called the accepted highway into the lower West at the time Lieutenant Pike set out to find the headwaters of the Red River. There is a shrewd doubt as to Pike's innocence in getting over on the head of the Rio Grande instead of the Red River. It was at least a lucky mistake; and his captivity among the Spaniards was productive of very good results to the United States later on, one of its most important results being his suggesting the route along the Arkansas, instead of the Platte, for the west-bound travelers. It was strong-legged, stout-hearted Zebulon who told of the profits of the possible Spanish trade, and credit is usually given him for first outlining the historic trail along the Arkansas.
It grew shorter and shorter, this wagon trail to the West, as the traders came to know the country. The government surveyed a fine way for the caravans, which took them around the dangerous Cimarron desert, and clung to the waters a trifle longer; yet the travelers would have none of it, but built their trail so direct from Independence to Santa Fé that not even those air-line lovers, the railway engineers, could so very much improve it when they came to make their iron trail between those two points.