 So here we are again. This time it's the Santa Fe Trail mountain route. I have decided I'm going to make an obnoxiously specific video. Maybe some of you will like it, but I just want to mess with the algorithm. Anyway. So it's about the Santa Fe Trail, and it stretches from more or less central Missouri over to Santa Fe, and it was developed in the 1820s. I'm sure most of my American viewers anyway learned about the mountain men and the fur trade in their American history class, but they would tell us about it, and then they wouldn't tell us like how the furs made it from the wilderness to civilization. I'm using scare quotes around both of those. And the Santa Fe Trail is one of the answers here. It was developed in the 1870s, and it stretched, as you can see, roughly central Missouri over to Santa Fe, New Mexico. And part of the reason Santa Fe was picked as one end of this is that it was a really fantastic way to get your trade down into Mexico from the United States along the Camino Real de Tierra Adentro. And Santa Fe was the end of that, and that went down to Mexico City. So Santa Fe was a really good place just to get American goods down to Mexico in a time before railroads. Oops, there's a spoiler. So as you can see in what is now western Kansas, the Santa Fe Trail splits into two halves, and the one that goes further south is called the Cimarron Trail. The Cimarron Route, and the one further north is the Mountain Route. The reason you'd want to take the Cimarron Route is that it's shorter. The problem, however, is that there's not a whole lot of water through there, and the Comanche Empire, and I love the notion of the Comanches having an empire, right in the middle of a couple of modern countries we have the Comanches having an empire. It's not just a bunch of Comanche Raiders, it's a Comanche Empire. I like that notion a lot better. Anyway, they would raid along the Cimarron Route, and you'd have losses from your furs and your trade goods and whatnot, and between that and the lack of water, the longer route sometimes made a bit more sense. It followed along the Arkansas River for quite a ways, and then it went down through the Tongue Pass, and it joined back up at a place called Port Union, and then it went to Santa Fe. So anyway, I'm going to start in Kansas City, and look, there's a picture of me, and I have not been shrunk to the size of a badmet and shuttlecock. No, no, these are enormous ones at the Art Museum in Kansas City, so just so you know, it's really historically authentic there. The next stop, and I'm going to make a huge jump because, well, I didn't go to Kansas this time. I went to Colorado and New Mexico, and it's Bent's Old Fort. These days, it's a national historic site. The original fort was kind of lost to time, but we know where it was. We had some good descriptions of it. They rebuilt it. Now, if you look closely at some of these pictures, if you are ever in the Denver area and you go to a museum, a restaurant called The Fort, you may find that it looks awfully similar, and apparently they stole the design of the restaurant, The Fort, from Bent's Old Fort. Anyway, gratuitous shot of myself and my children. Some of us wanted to go, and some of us didn't, but we got into The Fort, and as you can see, it's protected from the planes, and they had all sorts of stuff there, so there would be trade goods coming from Missouri, and the furs, I'll talk about that in a minute. And because of the location of The Fort, they had to be able to do everything. So here's a carpenter's shop. There's also a blacksmith's shop, but you had to be able to do everything. You had to be very self-sufficient, and they were. Again, we're out in the central courtyard of Bent's Old Fort, and over there on the right here, I'll highlight it with this nice green arrow, is a press for squishing all the air out of the furs, and the fur trapping the air is what makes it nice and warm, which is why people liked it, and aside from the fact that maybe it's pretty, which it is. But you'd have to squeeze all the air out so you could bring more back on your wagons. Speaking of wagons, they would be drawn by horses and mules and oxen. Apparently the oxen were slightly favored because when the Comanche raided, they liked the horses but didn't have as much use for the oxen. So the oxen were more likely to not be taken in a raid. Raid. That sounds so terrible. How about tribute? Forced tribute. Yes, that's better than a raid. Forced tribute to the Comanche Empire. I like that even better. Anyway, so you're at Bent's Old Fort, of course at the time it wasn't Bent's Old Fort, it was just Bent's Fort, and you know, people being people, you've got to have some creature comforts. So they had a pool room, a billiards room, and today the peacocks are using it, and apparently there were peacocks there in the mid-1800s, so at the historic site they have peacocks. Anyway, the pool table has a cloth over it because the peacocks get everywhere and so does their excrement. Let's play some pool peacocks. As you can see after playing pool with the peacocks, everybody is much happier and the youngest member of our party was talking about building a replica of Bent's Old Fort Minecraft. We shall see if that actually happens. Anyway, next stop on the Santa Fe Trail is Fort Union, and Fort Union is largely a ruin today, and Fort Union is super interesting. So I was talking with the Ranger there, and it was shortly before closing time, so we were the only people there. The problem with going shortly before closing time is you don't have as much time to look around as you'd like, but whatever. So I talked to them, and they had an Earthworks mound. It didn't look like much, so I didn't take a picture of it. There's an Earthworks fort, kind of a star-shaped fort. If you've been to a star-shaped fort, you've seen this kind of thing before. Earthworks mound, and it was in bad repair, so I asked the guy, I was like, what can you tell me about the Earthworks mound? Is it in such bad shape, just because once they were done using it during the Civil War, they let it go into disrepair, and the Ranger gave me a really fascinating answer. He said, actually, what it is is the Dunning-Kruger effect. So apparently the Army thought they would just have the soldiers build the Earthworks, because how hard could that possibly be? And once you get the soldiers going, it's like they're piling up the dirt, and it's like, oh, look at us, we're piling up dirt, and we're really good at this, and we're so much better at this than we think we would be. Except they're not. Anyway, the Earthworks at Fort Union is the second Earthworks. The first one apparently just, it would wash away every time it rained, so they built in a slightly different spot, and it worked out a little better. But then they hired actual builders to build the third version of Fort Union, whose ruins you see here. And they hired actual builders, and so as you can see, it sticks around a little better. In fact, these ruins did not just disintegrate with time. What happened was, the Army, when they decommissioned the fort, about 1910, I seem to recall, they called up a demolition crew and started just tearing the thing down, and they got pretty far with it, as you can see, and none of the surrounding communities, or at least the rangers of the surrounding communities, I was there. I can't say is there any real surrounding communities. Anyway, he said, the surrounding communities kind of said, hey, wait a second, we want some preservation of this site, so they stopped the demolition. This last building at Fort Union is the hospital. It's the only hospital for quite a distance in any direction. I would guess heading east, probably the only one until well into Kansas. And the final stop on the trail is obviously Santa Fe. Here is a street in Santa Fe. I don't know that the house is all that old, but it just gives you an idea of the general kinds of construction you might see there. And here is the Mission de San Miguel. It's a mission church. It's probably the oldest church in the United States. And then finally, the Palace of the Governors, which is definitely the oldest public building in the United States dating from about 1610. And this was the terminus of the Santa Fe Trail, and where traders would then catch the Camino Real de Tierra Adentro down to Mexico City, as I mentioned before. So if the Santa Fe Trail was such a big deal, why haven't you really heard much about it, unless you're hugely into this part of the world or this part of American history? Well, it fades out of existence because of the railroad. So in the late 1860s and into the early 1870s, the Atchison Topeka and Santa Fe Railroad, hint, hint, spoiler on the name as to where it goes. And if you line up Atchison, Topeka, and Santa Fe, you see that it's more or less the Santa Fe Trail. And the railroad kind of kills this route because, well, it's faster, and enforced tribute from the Comanche Empire kind of stops being a thing because the train's a little faster, or maybe it wasn't. I don't know. I didn't research that part at all. But the interesting thing about the Santa Fe Trail is that it kind of comes back in the form of Route 66. Now, obviously Route 66 does not follow exactly the Santa Fe Trail, but it kind of sorta does, sorta. So anyway, in the 1930s, the whole Santa Fe Trail came back, and in fact, I drove along much of the Santa Fe Trail on Interstate 25, mostly through Vertone Pass, all the way down to Santa Fe. So, yeah, changing modes of transportation bring us back to old routes. So anyway, this is the part where I say click like and subscribe and leave some comments. Make my family happy. We need to get up to 1,000 subscribers. You'll never, ever help me if you don't click subscribe. Sorry, I'm just trying to make a baby video here. We'll see. We'll do something next time. I may talk about shoes or I may just rant. I don't know. We'll see you next time.