My Road Trips on the Santa Fe and Oregon Historic Trails
Commerce, Migration, and Conquest in the American West
After Lewis and Clark’s Corps of Discovery opened the American West, which I wrote about here, Santa Fe and the Spanish-ruled Southwest beckoned. Then, in the 1840s, tens of thousands of settlers trekked to Oregon.
I drove along these trails as I visited places where history happened, searching for how the United States expanded into the Mexican Southwest and the Pacific Northwest. I found that these trails first brought American merchants to New Mexico, farmers to the Northwest, and soldiers into northern Mexico's desert.