Lecture 5: Trails Across the
Plains
Summary to be added
Outline of Lecture
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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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