The Old Spanish Trail, Santa Fe to Los Angeles

Abstract

-HE OLD SPANISH TRAIL was a well-marked travel path of the far I West one hundred years ago. For some two decades only it was a trail of regular commerce between northern New Mexico and southern California, and it appears that no wagon ever traversed its entire length. It was a pack-horse trail, a route for driven livestock. It went northwest from the frontier outpost of Abiquiu, New Mexico, crossed the Colorado and Green rivers above their junction, circled well northward into Utah to avoid the Grand Canyon of the Colorado and the dry broken country to the north of that scenic chasm, and turned southwest across the desert of southern Nevada and California to San Bernardino. The inception and evolution of the Old Spanish Trail involves an interesting development. To no one person can be given the honor of opening this historic route. Its eastern end was pioneered by traders visiting the Utes, cattlemen hunting new pastures, prospectors seeking mines. Most of those journeys were never recorded, and by the time we get our first written report a large section of the country through which the trail passed was already known and the rivers had been given their musical Spanish names. In 1765 Juan de Rivera went on a prospecting trip that not only took him to the mineral veins of the La Plata (Silver) Mountains of southwestern Colorado, but over the divides to the Dolores and Uncompahgre rivers as far north as the Gunnison, near present Delta, Colorado. Some of his men retraced the trail ten years later.1 Then came the idea of a road leading from New Mexico to the California missions. This was envisioned by Father Escalante, a bold