Lecture 5: Trails Across the
Plains
Transportation is important to any developing frontier,
and to any settled society, but transportation played a distinctive role on
the Great Plains frontier and continues to do so in regional society.
Outline of
Lecture
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Introduction:
The Interstate Syndrome
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The Santa Fe Trail
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The Santa Fe Trail, pioneered in 1821 by William
Becknell, followed the Arkansas River across the central plains in order to
connect the border towns of the Missouri River with the Mexican towns of New Mexico. Its
purpose was commerce—hence the title of Josiah Gregg’s classic travel
narrative, The Commerce of the Prairies. Documents of the Santa Fe Trade,
nevertheless, reveal much more about experiences on and attitudes toward
the plains than just business considerations.
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The Oregon Trail
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The Oregon Trail is
also known as the California Trail and also as the Mormon Trail. It began its history in the 1840s as the Platte River
route across the plains for farm-family emigrants to Oregon.
After 1849 it also was the principal overland route for argonauts heading for the California goldfields. Following the same general path, but
trekking up the other bank of the Platte, came Mormon pilgrims bound for
the valley of the Great Salt Lake.
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Flat Bottoms
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Steamboat traffic on the rivers of the plains,
particularly the Missouri,
was important in the earliest phases of white penetration of the
region. Steamboats carried the goods
and provisions of the fur trade and supplied early military posts. The difficulties of navigation on shallow
streams of intermittent flow, however, made steamboat transport inadequate
for subsequent settlement.
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Wheels &
Wires
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The story of government subsidy to western railroads is
familiar; less commonly recognized is that any transportation venture into
a new land requires government assistance.
This was true of stagecoach traffic on the plains, which operated by
virtue of mail contracts, and also of freighting, which thrived by
transporting government supplies.
The colorful experiment of pony express communications was but a
brief episode preceding the advent of electronic communications across the
plains.
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Parallel Lines
to the Horizon
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Railroads across open country, no customers in sight—it
hardly seems to make sense. It
didn’t, in fact, which was why the US and Canadian governments provided
massive subsidies (cash along with land) for the construction of
transcontinental railroads.
Railroads across the plains were considered to be in the national
interest, connecting east and west and developing the interior. Along the way the railroads left
indelible imprints on both town and country.
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Paving the
Plains
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Construction of roads and highways, too, also required
federal support. This commenced with
the historical coincidence of Progressive activism and automotive transport
in the early 20th century. The
result was the Good Roads Movement.
Following the Second World War came massive
road construction aimed at establishment of the interstate highway
system. Like the railroads of
previous generations, the interstates, too, reshaped human patterns on the
prairies.
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