The Old Santa Fe Trail, by Stanley Vestal, University of Nebraska Press, Lincoln, Nebraska, 1996, $14 paperback.
Originally published in 1939, this very readable account of the 175-year-old Santa Fe Trail is being made available again in a Bison Book edition. The trail dates back to 1821 when William Becknell and five companions brought their pack mules to the Southwest and opened the door for American trade with Mexican-controlled Santa Fe (see stories in the August 1996 Wild West). Although Stanley Vestal (his real name was Walter S. Campbell) was a longtime English professor at the University of Oklahoma, he clearly wrote an entertaining account for popular–rather than academic–consumption. As Marc Simmons points out in the introduction to the Bison edition, Vestal said hardly anything about Becknell’s first trip and some other major trail events. Instead of taking a chronological approach to his subject, Vestal concentrated on topics that intrigued him and made exciting reading, to avoid “the stamp of texbookishness.” In his preface, Vestal describes travel on the old trail as “a perilous cruise across a boundless sea of grass, over forbidding mountains, among wild beasts and wilder men, ending in an exotic city offering quick riches, friendly foreign women, and a moral holiday.” Readers looking for loads of facts about the trail will have to go elsewhere, but Vestal recaptures the hopes and fears of trail travelers–and that makes for mighty fine175th-anniversary reading.
