All America can remember the days when we were agitated by the tremendous problem of a line of rails across the American continent, a feat so long regarded as chimerical. We knew of California and we wished for a road thither, had long wished for it. But many years before we had begun to dream of an iron road, and many years after we had dreamed of it, we made our way from the Missouri to the Rockies, over the Rockies to the Pacific, by the same methods that had brought us to the heads of all our Western rivers. We used the pack-horse and the wagon train. Those were the days of the heroically great transcontinental trails. It is interesting to study these ancient land routes; and for our purposes we shall start the wagon roads at the Missouri River, and shall speak chiefly of the two historic and great Western pathways, that by the Arkansas and that by the Platte.
Of these two great land trails west of the Missouri, one, broken midway, does not deserve actually the name of transcontinental trail. This was the old Santa Fé trail, which could be called continuous only as far as the Spanish province of New Mexico. Commerce got westward even so far as California in some fashion, now and again, from Taos and the old city of Santa Fé, but Spanish trails and the old trapping roads west of New Mexico were commonly concerned with the pack-train and not the wagon.
The other overland trail, and the greatest of all American roads, if we measure length and importance as well, was the ancient Oregon trail up the Platte, over the South Pass and down the Columbia; a trail forgotten by most of the young men of to-day, and existing no more to terrify the young women whom young men marry, as they did in the times of our fathers, when moving West meant tearing out the heart.
As to the theory of straight lines, Lieutenant Pike tells us that the first men to reach Santa Fé did not go straight westward, but also wandered up the aboriginal highway of the Platte valley, over what was later to be the course of the Oregon trail, turning to the southward when far up the stream, and following the South Fork of the Platte down into the Rockies, which would bring the traveler within wilderness-touch of the Spanish settlements. La Lande, the perfidious trader, who so sadly left in the lurch his patron, the merchant Morrison of Kaskaskia, and took up his permanent abode in Santa Fé, is thought to have reached that city, in the year 1804, by this route; and it is known that James Purcell (or James Pursley, as Pike has the spelling) was directed to Santa Fé in the year 1805 by some Indians whom he met on the upper Platte.