Walking the Santa Fe Trail One Word at a Time During the The Bent’s Fort Years (1833–1849): Letters, Stories & Incidents from the Edge of the Frontier

NOTE: A couple years ago, I released Letters, Stories and Incidents on the Santa Fe Trail : The Bent’s Fort Years. Recently, someone asked me if the book was any good.

My answer? Oh yes. It has the best discussion of the “innumerable” buffalo herds of the American West you’ll find anywhere outside the writings of Lewis and Clark. What it does even better is document the long decline of those herds toward near extinction.

Nowhere are the sights of the trail more powerfully captured than in the buffalo descriptions—herds so large they took days to pass, their hoofbeats felt in the ground as much as heard in the air.

Between the dusty plains of Missouri and the high desert of New Mexico stretched one of the most legendary roads in American history—the Santa Fe Trail. But during the years when Bent’s Fort stood as a commercial and cultural hub (1833–1849), the trail was more than a line on a map. It was alive with ambition, hardship, danger, and humanity.

That’s what makes Letters, Stories & Incidents from Santa Fe and Bent’s Fort such a treasure. This remarkable collection of firsthand accounts captures the voices of traders, travelers, soldiers, and settlers—people who experienced the trail not as legend, but as reality. Their words, often scribbled under the weight of fatigue or penned in moments of awe, tell a story that’s raw, real, and deeply human.

A Road Built on Grit and Gold

The Santa Fe Trail got its start in 1821, thanks to Missouri trader William Becknell. Early expeditions were small, cooperative ventures. Men pooled their resources—mules, rifles, supplies—and signed strict agreements, complete with fines, to ensure no one backed out. The rewards were worth it. By the 1830s, the trade was booming, drawing as much as $100,000 a year back to Missouri in gold, furs, and livestock.

But that wealth came at a steep cost.

Mississippi Free Trader (Natchez, Mississippi) 18 Jan 1833.

The journey west was brutal. Mud-choked wagon paths turned into dust trails. Water could be dangerously scarce. Some travelers drank foul pond water that made them sick; others froze in blizzards or collapsed from heat. Prairie fires swept through grasslands, leaving behind blackened ash and nervous livestock. Oxen and mules often died of thirst or exhaustion. Sometimes the people did, too.

One letter describes a man watching his horse freeze to death just ten feet away. Another talks about burning buffalo dung for fuel. And yet, despite all this, the trail drew more people every year.

The Vermont Courier (Woodstock, Vermont) 6 Dec 1833

Council Grove to Bent’s Fort: A Lifeline on the Plains

Most expeditions stopped at Council Grove in present-day Kansas to regroup. It was a place to elect leaders, check firearms, and prepare for the desert ahead. It was also the last bit of comfort for hundreds of miles. One traveler called it “an oasis in reality.”

Eventually, the weary wagons would roll into Bent’s Fort—four hundred miles from the nearest American settlement. Built of adobe bricks, the fort stood proudly on the Arkansas River, offering traders shelter, supplies, and stories. It was a vital stop and a rare symbol of stability in a chaotic land. Inside its thick walls were wagon yards, stores, and sleeping quarters. Outside, a kaleidoscope of cultures—Cheyenne, Comanche, Mexican, American—converged to trade, barter, and occasionally brawl.

Bent’s Fort was a meeting ground where alliances were made, tensions flared, and the rhythms of frontier life played out.

Friends, Foes, and Fragile Peace

Indian relations along the trail were complex and often volatile. Some stories tell of terrifying raids—like one in which 250 Comanches attacked a wagon train for over 30 hours. Others describe more peaceful encounters, like Colonel Dodge’s 1834 expedition that sought to establish lasting peace with the Plains tribes.

But peace was fragile. Tribes like the Pawnee and Comanche were expert horsemen and warriors. Government protection was inconsistent at best. One paper noted that U.S. military escorts had only once offered real protection to traders on the trail.

Still, there were moments of understanding and exchange. Indians traded buffalo meat and hides. Mexican “rancheros” showed off their expert lasso skills, sometimes using them for buffalo hunting—and sometimes for robbery. There were cultural clashes, but also signs of respect and curiosity on all sides.

Santa Fe and the Mexican Frontier

Arriving in Santa Fe was like stepping into another world. The city was made almost entirely of sun-dried adobe—“mud-built,” as one observer put it—with flat roofs, dirt floors, and a population somewhere between 3,600 and 8,000.

Life in Santa Fe was lively but laced with corruption. Gambling dens and fandangos (lively dances) were the main attractions. Bribery at the customs house was common. Many American traders smuggled goods by burying them in hidden caches outside town. Officials often looked the other way—for a fee.

In 1837, tensions boiled over. Locals, angry at high taxes and corrupt leadership, rose up in revolt. Governor Peres and other officials were executed. This violent uprising exposed the deep divides within Mexican New Mexico—and made it clear how unstable the region had become.

Augusta Chronicle And Sentinel (Augusta, Georgia) 12 Jun 1838.

As the 1840s rolled on, talk of war with the United States grew louder. By 1846, Santa Fe braced for invasion.

War, Occupation, and a New Flag

General Stephen Kearny’s American troops rolled into Santa Fe in 1846 with surprisingly little resistance. Some residents welcomed them. Others kept a wary distance. The American flag went up, and within months a new provisional government was in place.

Local Mexican leaders even petitioned Congress for U.S. territorial status. They wanted schools, protection from Texas land claims—and most notably, they strongly opposed slavery. The trail had ushered in not just trade, but dramatic political change.

People of the Trail: Big Personalities, Small Moments

What makes Letters, Stories & Incidents so captivating isn’t just the big events—it’s the people.

There’s Jim V., who wrecked his wagon just to get out of driving duty. Bernardo, a sick Mexican boy who died whispering “Agua.” Timotéo, a six-year-old collecting cigar stubs for his blind grandmother, who refused to leave her even when offered a new life in the U.S.

Lazy Hasey managed to avoid work with astonishing ease, yet somehow remained popular. Jim Rogers, a half-breed trapper, lived months alone in the wild and loved it. And then there were the Bowie brothers—Rezin and James—famed for their grit and guns, one even calculating a shot to take down two Comanches at once. These are the stories of real people. They struggled, they joked, they wept, they survived.

Wilderness, Wildlife, and the Weight of Distance

The trail teemed with life—buffalo by the thousands, prairie dogs chattering from underground towns, the occasional grizzly lurking in the shadows. Some travelers hunted for meat. Others hunted for sport. One man recoiled at the “pitiless” way buffalo were butchered by certain groups. Another described the sound of a herd as like “the distant surging of the ocean.”

Yet, the wilderness wasn’t just about animals. It was about silence. Loneliness. A feeling one traveler called “complete companionless.” And still, in the midst of it, there were moments of joy: cool groves, sunrise over the plains, the sudden green of grass after a storm.

The trail changed people. It taught resilience. It exposed human flaws. It revealed the limits of toughness—and the power of kindness.

The sources provide exceptionally vivid and comprehensive accounts of the vast buffalo herds encountered by travelers on the Santa Fe Trail during the Bent’s Fort years. These “word sketches” offer an unfiltered, first-person perspective, detailing not only the sheer numbers of these “monarch[s] of the prairies” but also their behaviors and the profound impact they had on the landscape and the travelers.

“Like the Distant Surging of the Ocean”: Buffalo Encounters on the Santa Fe Trail

Travelers frequently observed “innumerable” buffalo, with “vast legions” appearing daily along the Arkansas River to drink and seek new pastures. One account describes an “enormous band” so dense that it “covered the earth in all directions,” changing the prairie’s green to black, and taking two full days for the travelers to pass through. The sound of these immense herds was likened to the “distant surging of the ocean, or midnight thunder”. A particularly striking event recounted is the buffalo crossing the Arkansas, filling the river so rapidly that animals were “overwhelmed by the crowd thronging behind,” and an earlier instance where trappers were delayed four days by buffalo crossing the Missouri, with hundreds drowning. The sources also depict the aftermath of hunts, with “huge skeletons… backbones and skulls, ribs and hoofs, and half demolished hides… fast mouldering and whitening in the sun,” testifying to many successful hunts performed by Native Americans.

Beyond their sheer numbers, the narratives delve into specific, often poignant, observations of individual animals. One remarkable “Prairie Sketch” details an encounter with a blind buffalo bull running in continuous circles, whose sightless, white eyes and stubborn resistance to death left a lasting impression on the observer. The reasons for this blindness, often attributed to wolf attacks on lone bulls, are also discussed. The sources further describe the terrifying experience of a lost man narrowly escaping being “trodden to death” by a “compact and enumerable band of buffalo” moving like a “rolling ocean” in the deep midnight.

The accounts also touch on buffalo hunting techniques, from “crawling” to stalk a single animal, to the “curiously and admirably performed exploit” of a Mexican matadore using a lance to manage a wounded cow for miles. However, the brutality of some butchering practices, where animals were dismembered while still alive, “curdled [the writer’s] blood,” leading him to denounce the “cruel sport of buffalo hunting” and the “callous want of feeling”. The pervasive presence of white wolves, often following the wagons, served as a constant reminder of the buffalo’s abundance, as they quickly consumed any abandoned carcasses.

A Trail Fading into Memory

By the late 1840s, the Santa Fe Trail’s days were numbered. New roads and, eventually, the railroad would replace it. But during the Bent’s Fort years, it was everything: a road, a risk, a dream, and a crucible.

Letters, Stories & Incidents reminds us that history isn’t just about generals and treaties. It’s also about the man who burned buffalo dung to stay warm, the boy who wouldn’t leave his grandmother, and the wild-eyed trapper who laughed at loneliness.

The Santa Fe Trail was built on their stories—and thanks to collections like this, we can still walk it today, one word at a time.

These firsthand “word sketches” and “pen pictures” provide an immersive understanding of the buffalo’s prominence in the Western landscape and its critical role in the lives of both Native Americans and pioneers during the Bent’s Fort years.

More on the The Buffalo

Travelers frequently observed “innumerable” buffalo, with “vast legions” appearing daily along the Arkansas River to drink and seek new pastures. One account describes an “enormous band that opened a path for us as we approached, and closed again behind us as we moved along. We were ourselves as much at a loss to judge of their number as the reader will be. It would have been as easy for us to stand still in a forest and count the trees, as then to have made a calculation, and the writer can but say that they covered the earth in all directions. The natural green of the prairie was changed to black, and away to the horizon all around us spread a dense herd of the wild inheritors of the wilderness“. This enormous band could take two full days for the travelers to pass through, as “The next day it was the same”. The sound of these immense herds was likened to “the distant surging of the ocean, or midnight thunder”. A particularly striking event recounted is how mountain trappers descending the Missouri were “compelled to halt four days, to allow the passage across the river of a band of buffalo; and, the river being deep, and the crowd so great, hundreds were drowned, and their carcasses were afterwards seen by the descending trappers lying among the logs upon the island, and along the banks“

Beyond their sheer numbers, the narratives delve into specific, often poignant, observations of individual animals. One remarkable “Prairie Sketch” details an encounter with a buffalo exhibiting a “strange peculiarity of running in a circle,” a behavior “but little known” even to “Old hunters,” who were as frightened as the inexperienced when the “huge beast suddenly left its circle and dashed headlong towards us”

. The accounts also touch upon the aftermath of hunts, noting that “the dead carcasses were left to feed the wolves in the night”. After three buffalo were left skinned and partly cut up, “The next morning there was not a hide, a bone, or a bit of meat, within fifty yards of the place,” indicating the efficiency of scavengers

The accounts also describe various buffalo hunting techniques. One method involved “crawling” to stalk a single animal, where hunters “approached slowly, bending our bodies and taking off our hats while on the high ground to conceal ourselves from the beast, but when in a hollow where he could not see us, we ran with our best speed to shorten the distance between us” before taking a deliberate shot

. Another “curious and admirable exploit” involved a Mexican matadore named José Alexico, who used a lance to “manage” a wounded cow for miles. Alexico wounded the cow just enough “not materially to diminish her strength,” then by “aggravating and teazing his victim with the point of his long lance, contrived to make the huge brute chase him,” guiding her in the desired direction

However, the narratives also expose the brutality of some butchering practices. The writer describes seeing Spaniards “tearing away the reeking skin of the buffalo while it yet lay panting with life,” driven by haste as night and a storm approached

. This “horrid scene curdled his blood, and he turned away sick, forever after of the cruel sport of buffalo hunting“. He recalled another instance where a “cruelly-tortured cow actually breathed its last while its merciless butchers were chopping the ribs from its side”

The pervasive presence of white wolves also features prominently. As travelers’ oxen failed, they were “obliged to leave one behind. Thus, the hungry jaws of the white wolves soon made them to disappear from the face of the Earth and by thus affording these voracious animals food, we had a continual pack of lean, lank and gaunt followers. Drooling hunger-demons, following us stealthily day, and howling around us by night“

Although generally not attacking men, their voracity was evident when they completely devoured three buffalo carcasses overnight, leaving “not a hide, a bone, or a bit of meat, within fifty yards of the place”

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