Old Spanish Trail (trade route)
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- Place names used in this article refer to present-day states and communities. Few (if any) settlements existed originally, although many of the geologic features along the Trail retain their Spanish designations.
The Old Spanish Trail is a historic trade route which connected the northern New Mexican settlement of Santa Fé with that of Los Ángeles in California. Approximately 1,200 miles (2,000 km) long, it ran though areas of high mountains, arid deserts, and deep canyons. Explored by European travelers as early as 1776, the Trail saw extensive use by pack trains from about 1829 until the mid-1850s.
The eastern areas of the Old Spanish Trail, including southwest Colorado and southeast Utah, were explored by Juan Maria de Rivera in 1765. Franciscan missionaries Francisco Atanasio Domínguez and Silvestre Vélez de Escalante unsuccessfully attempted the trip to California, leaving Santa Fe in 1776 and making it all the way into the Great Basin near Utah Lake before returning via the Arizona Strip. Other expeditions then explored and traded in the region, finding shorter and less arduous routes through the mountains and deserts.
Little evidence exists that round-trips to California occurred before about 1829. Thereafter, regular caravans traveled the Trail, trading Native American slaves and woolen goods from New Mexico for high quality horses in California. John C. Frémont, "The Great Pathfinder," named the route in 1844. Trade continued until the mid-1850s, when a shift to the use of freight wagons made the old route obsolete. Additionally, both New Mexico and California had became U.S. territories as a result of the Mexican-American War of 1846-1848, and large numbers of Mormon immigrants were settling in Utah, affecting both trade interests and tolerance for the slavery of American Natives.
The central route of the Old Spanish Trail ran northwest from Santa Fe through southwestern Colorado, past the San Juan Mountains, Mancos, and Dove Creek. Entering Utah near Monticello, it proceeded north through difficult terrain to Spanish Valley near Moab, crossed the Colorado River, then turned west to cross the Green River. The route then passed through (or around) the San Rafael Swell, the northernmost reach of the Trail. Entering the Great Basin via Salina Canyon, it turned southwest, crossing southern Nevada (near Las Vegas) and the Mojave Desert before reaching Mission San Gabriel Arcángel and El Pueblo de Los Ángeles in California. Alternate routes for this journey existed through central Colorado and through the Arizona Strip.
Although few traces of the early traders remain, the Trail is now commemorated in many local street and road names, and numerous historical markers in the states that it crossed. It is listed as the Old Spanish National Historic Trail by the Bureau of Land Management and National Park Service. Portions of US 160 in Colorado and US 191 in Utah are similarly designated. In 2001, the section of the Trail that runs across Nevada from the Arizona border to California (known as the "Mormon Road Historic District") was placed on the National Register of Historic Places as #NPS-01000863.
