In 2023, the estimated drive time from Kansas City to Denver, Colorado, is 8 hours 40 minutes.

Kansas City to Santa Fe, New Mexico is 11 hours, 48 minutes.

Long drives, but traveling along well-established paved highways, they are technically doable in a day.

This is a far cry from the time when making those same journeys inspired some explorers to call the distance between these points the Great American Desert.

The idea of trails throughout the Great Plains go back to the Native Americans of several thousand years ago.

We do know that the Native Americans have been in the area for about 13,000 years.

Whether there were trails or not, we don't know.

We don't have the written history because the historians say it has to be the written word.

Anything in Kansas prior to August of 1541 is prehistoric.

This region was occupied for at least 10,000 years and maybe longer by indigenous people who had migrated to the Americas from Asia.

And there were there were numerous types of societies.

There were very stable societies.

They lived in Earth lodges and there were mobile societies that they just traveled around to follow the buffalo herds more than anything else.

Prehistorically, in eastern Kansas, there had to be pretty much trade routes because you get copper in the Kansas City region, dating around about the time of Christ, cold hammered copper that came from the Great Lakes region.

You get quartzite sandstone made out of what is called Catlinite out of southern Missouri.

Around from the Great Plains you might find some artifacts made from stone, from eastern Colorado or Wyoming or Obsidian from Idaho or Montana or New Mexico.

There were probably traders just like we had now, that would have things to bring in to a new country and change.

There's a lot of stone cold alivates that is only found around the in the Texas Panhandle, around the Amarillo area that's up here.

And we're get Knife River Flint occasionally from the Knife River in North Dakota.

And this is all prehistoric stuff.

History officially begins in 1541 when Coronado came through and some of the soldiers were writing down in journals.

The first explorers in this area were likely Spanish.

The one that I'm most familiar with is Coronado, and his name is literally tacked on to signs all over the state of Kansas.

He was thought to have entered Kansas just south of Ford, Kansas.

And if you go a little bit further north, then you will be on Highway 400 coming out of Dodge City.

And midway between there is the Coronado Cross on the bluff where they believe he stopped for a time.

We think about Coronado and they say, well, he was exploring.

He wasn't.

He was on a mission to find cities of gold in the Great Plains.

So he hears this rumor and this guy they call the Turk that's spreading the rumor he was from some tribe in Kansas offers to lead Coronado out to the land of gold.

I mean, he makes it sound so good that the streets are paved with gold.

I mean somewhere he got that story.

And he was looking for the seven cities of Cibola or the seven cities of gold.

He never found them.

What he found instead were many semi-nomadic Indian tribes.

They meet these plains tribes living in earth lodges, but there's no gold anyplace.

The Coronado Expedition, which is interesting, gave very favorable reports on Kansas for land for agriculture.

You wouldn't believe.

I mean, it was glowing.

Well, if you come from the desert southwest and arrive in Kansas, it looks like this is the garden.

You compare what Coronado wrote to what the early explorers from the East Coast, Eastern United States, wrote.

They called it what, the Great American Desert.

Depends on where you come from, your perspective of of what's here.

But this 1541 expedition, you know, it's the first written record that we have of what somebody coming to this area thought of it.

And and I'm always amused at the difference in the point of view.

But the Coronado expedition, you know, that's the beginning of the Euro-American contact with the area of Kansas.

There were there were French explorers that were here in the early 1600s that came across.

And they were looking primarily for opportunities for fur trade.

So a lot of these expeditions were just to claim the land.

And of course, there's a controversy on whether it belonged to France or to Spain.

It belonged to the Native Americans, but that was the overrun of it.

No, we're going to claim it for our country over you know, hundreds or thousands of miles away.

Probably the first thing that we need to understand is the Doctrine of Discovery, which goes back to the 15th century to papal bulls were issued.

One at the request of Portugal, which was one of the first nations to actually do a lot of exploring, starting in Africa, and later for the benefit of Spain.

And this doctrine basically said that Christian nations that discover the lands of non-Christian peoples may take their land and they may take the people as well.

This was a justification for the enslavement of Africans.

It was the justification for taking the Indian lands.

So that all figures in when we start looking at the European efforts to move into North America.

And we often think of the Spanish and the British, but the French dominated the central plains for a long period of time.

They probably were more successful and in trade with Indigenous people.

The traders and trappers that came through were doing that because they were on a mission to get as many furs as they can, and it was either doing it themselves and trapping, which they did, or trading the goods they had with the Native Americans.

So they were both hunters and trappers, I guess, and also traders at the same time.

My name is James A. Hanson.

I am the historian and publications editor for the Museum of the Fur Trade.

The fur trade is actually an outgrowth of Indian inter-tribal trade in prehistoric times.

Indians had vast networks of commerce.

When Europeans first discovered the new continent, they found that the Indians were fascinated with all the colorful cloth and axes, knives, kettles.

And so almost instantly, an important commerce grew up between native people who had things that Europeans wanted and the Europeans who furnished all these wonderful trade goods.

It continued as an important industry in the continental United States until after the Civil War.

In Canada, the fur trade under the Hudson's Bay company was significant until about 1900, and it lasted in places in Alaska into the 1950s.

Our exhibits cover everything from beads to blankets to guns to kettles.

And then one thing that we started about ten years ago, it was Charles Hansen's idea to publish an encyclopedia of trade goods.

Put everything we know, all of our research into a single significant source for just people interested in native culture.

Well, to find the answers to the questions that the fur trade raises, we've had to go to Europe, especially England and France, collecting information about the goods that they produced.

And and then we have supplied that information to a number of publishing companies over here.

The purpose of our research is to determine two things that we talk about in this museum.

One is the materials of the fur trade, and the second are the methods by which the fur trade operated, whether it was canoes, two wheeled cards or steamboats.

We're interested in how it affected the native culture.

That's our principal goal.

The Museum of the Fur Trade is unique.

It's the only museum devoted to the whole history of the North American fur trade in all its aspects.

The United States looked westward from the early colonial period and never were able to get any farther with their endeavors than the Mississippi River.

And they were barred from the area west of the Mississippi by the French and also the Spanish during the Napoleonic era.

Napoleon had the idea of developing sugar plantations in the Caribbean islands, and he was going to use this land west of the Mississippi River as a granary to raise the food supply for the slaves.

That all changed as a result of a slave revolt in the early 1800s in the early 1800s on the island of Santo Domingo.

They defeated the French, drove them from the area.

Napoleon decided he didn't really need that land west of the Mississippi River after he lost it.

Actually, the reason that the United States acquired the Louisiana Purchase is thanks to that slave uprising.

The first, real successful slave uprising in the Americas.

President Jefferson in the United States is very much interested in moving west from the Mississippi River.

And Napoleon offers to sell this land to the United States.

That set the way for the Louisiana Purchase, which is sort of the key to understanding everything that happened afterward.

President Jefferson made the Louisiana Purchase.

Nobody had really seen this territory.

Nobody currently in government had seen this.

They didn't know what they'd bought.

In fact, he didn't buy it just because of all the land that came with it.

He bought it because he wanted Gulf and river access for trade and for access to other lands.

So his goal was to get the Mississippi River and access to the Gulf of Mexico.

So this is what starts the exploration.

Jefferson sends the Lewis and Clark expedition to well, first of all, they're looking for a waterway across the North American continent, believing that you could take the Missouri River to the mountains and maybe portage a little way with your boats and get on maybe the Columbia River and go to the Pacific Ocean.

Wasn't quite that easy, but that's what they were sent out to do.

There was no Kansas territory.

There was no dreams of Kansas.

There was nothing to suggest Kansas would ever, ever be anything but a vast expanse until later.

They just didn't have any plans for it except routes to take them around the United States.

But there was another expedition that was sent out that became much more important to the expansion of the United States into the plains and even through the development of the Santa Fe Trail.

And that's the Zebulon Pike expedition 1806 to 1807 to find the source of the Arkansas River.

The source of the Red River was with the belief that those two rivers would play an important role in the final boundary between the United States.

That was his main purpose.

He set out from Fort Bell Fontaine near near Saint Louis.

They came into Kansas in September of 1806.

They crossed the Flint Hills.

And interestingly, Pike named the Flint Hills.

And he wrote in his journal, crossed rough Flint Hills.

And that's the origin of that name.

He was the one that kept meticulous notes.

He drew maps.

He made note of the flora and fauna around the way, the terrain, the geology.

He started out with 23 men.

They sent five of those back to try to navigate the Arkansas River from present Great Bend, Kansas.

But Pike had gone west into present Colorado with only six, a party of 16, he searched and searched for the source of the Arkansas River and failed to find that.

He made the mistake of straying into Spanish territory when he went into southern Colorado.

He was arrested.

He and his men were taken to Chihuahua, New Mexico, or Mexico, where he was interrogated because they thought he was a spy.

And when he convinced them that he was just trying to find out what his country had acquired, then they marched him clear across Texas and released he and his men at the Mississippi River into Louisiana.

And the funny thing is, because they were afraid of the Native Americans, they allowed all of Pike's men to keep their weapons, but they confiscated his paper and his writing materials so that he could not spy.

So a very innovative man, he took his handkerchiefs and little bits of cloth that he could get, and with a charcoal, he continued to draw maps and make notes, which he rolled tightly and put down the barrels of his men's muskets.

And he when he finally did get back home after 1807, he wrote a comprehensive book which is still available.

Pike learns all about the population, the indigenous population, the government, the economy, the opportunities for trade that all go into his journal, which stimulates all sorts of things.

Then there's Stephen Long.

He came also at the request of the government 1816 to 1823.

He was better known as an inventor and a civil engineer than as an explorer.

He was asked to do this, but he did it more as a matter of interest for himself.

He covered over 26,000 miles in five expeditions out here into this territory.

He was the first to bring artists and scientists along.

He used a steamboat to travel up the Missouri River, and he was mainly tasked with finding the head waters of the Platte, Arkansas and Red Rivers.

Mr. Long was the one who called it the Great American Desert.

Long's turn of phrase created an imposing nickname for the region.

But Pike's earlier journey spurred on the trade routes through it.

Pike publishes his journal and in the journal he tells what the trade opportunities are in New Mexico.

You know, settlements in Missouri are closer to Santa Fe than Mexico City by far.

And he pointed out that they used pack mules to take about a six month trip to go to Mexico City and then another six months back to get supplies for the northern provinces.

But you could travel from Missouri over what he called a very nice road and you could go from Missouri to Santa Fe in probably two months.

It was soon after Pike's Journeys were published that people started trying to reach Santa Fe from Missouri, from Saint Louis.

None of those expeditions were successful because Spanish policy was no trade outside of the Spanish Empire.

Foreigners were arrested.

Their goods were confiscated.

Robert McKnight led a party from Saint Louis to Santa Fe in 1812 using Pike's maps to get there, and Pike's reports of what to take.

He and his men were arrested.

Their goods were confiscated, and they were not released from prison until 1821, when Mexico won its independence from Spain.

So they spent nine years in prison for their effort to get there.

William Bicknell was hard up for money.

He made some bad investments, so he took a risk and he took four or five men with him and a couple of wagons, and they made the trip West, headed for Santa Fe, where they did not know if they would be welcomed, arrested or simply turned away.

And they were welcomed with open arms.

And they were very surprised by this.

And then they discovered that Mexico had declared independence from Spain.

So they welcomed him with open arms.

He had about $500 worth of trade goods.

He comes back with a couple of thousand dollars and everybody then is on the band wagon.

Robert McKnight's brother and some others arrived in December.

They found his brother and their party that had been released from jail.

And so these these two two parties within just a matter of a few weeks, opened the Santa Fe trade.

And the next thing was and Bicknell took wagons over the trail in 1822 was to find a good wagon road.

And eventually that road developed along the north bank of the Arkansas River.

That establishment of the Santa Fe Trail and other routes like the Smokey Hill Trail set the stage for the further development of the region on pathways that pre-date written history.

Well, if you think about the era when the only thing out here were animals and Native Americans, and maybe not even the Native Americans so much, um, most of them were pretty nomadic tribes.

They followed the hunting and so almost every...

This is what I find really fascinating.

Almost every highway in America follows an old animal trail.

And that's why when you're traveling across the nation, there are always rivers nearby or what's left of them.

The thing that you had to have a supply of all along any trail was water.

You couldn't go, you know, if you could camp at water.

Well, animals move from one waterhole to another.

That's the way the trails developed.

And so when the Indians used them and then later the traders, you know, here's another day, here's another waterhole.

And so animals stayed next to rivers.

Animals followed areas where there was food and water.

And then the Native Americans arrived and they followed the animals because if they wanted to eat, you had to go where the animals were.

The fur traders and trappers, they they learned to use the Indian trails.

They learned from the Indians.

And when they became guides later to explorers or to wagon trains, they used those same trails.

Well, then the Santa Fe trail was was following the animal slash Native American trails along the Arkansas River.

And that's how the trails were laid out.

Was really terrain was a factor.

I mean, you tried to avoid, you know, real hilly ground or really rough ground.

Uh, interestingly enough, the railroad follows the same trails and the highways, the modern highways.

So the Smokey Hill Trail First railroad that builds across Kansas followed that route.

Interstate 70 follows a similar corridor.

People will go along I-70 in western Kansas, and they say how flat and boring it is.

The railroad it parallels... I-70 parallels the railroad for hundreds of miles.

The Atchison Topeka and Santa Fe that built across Kansas followed much of the old Santa Fe trail on into New Mexico.

And today, Highway 56 largely follows that same trail.

So we can really say, I think these transportation corridors have served every time period.

What was developed by the animals to get from one waterhole to the other became used by the Indians by the fur traders, by the Santa Fe traders and eventually the railroads and highways.

So it all fits a pattern.

It's animal to Native American to commerce, to modern highway.

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