On the heels of Lewis and Clark, who had just explored the Missouri River route to the Northwest, Captain Zebulon Pike of the Army, long before the first wheeled traffic started West, had employed this valley of the Arkansas in his search for the southwestern delimitations of the United States. Pike thought he had found the head of the Red River when after a toilsome and dangerous march he reached the headwaters of the Rio Grande. But it was not our river. It belonged to Spain, as he learned to his sorrow, when he marched all the way to Chihuahua in old Mexico and lay there during certain weary months.

It was Pike's story of the far Southwest that first started the idea of the commerce of the Santa Fe Trail. In that day geography was a human thing, a thing of vital importance to all men. Men did not read the stock markets; they read stories of adventure, tales of men returned from lands out yonder in the West. Heretofore the swarthy Mexicans, folk of the dry plains and hills around the head of the Rio Grande and the Red, had carried their cotton goods and many other small and needful things all the way from Vera Cruz on the seacoast, over trails that were long, tedious, uncertain, and expensive. A far shorter and more natural trade route went west along the Arkansas, which would bring the American goods to the doors of the Spanish settlements. After Pike and one or two others had returned with reports of the country, the possibilities of this trade were clear to any one with the merchant's imagination.