COMMERCE OF THE PRAIRIES AND DR. GREGG

By A. J. MORRISON

It is now a hundred years since the caravan trade began between Missouri in the United States and Sante Fé in the Empire, or Republic, of Mexico. We shall, of course, never comprehend the political psychology of our grand-parents if we lose sight of the fact that before the fall of 1821 Spain came rather close up to Kansas City; and further, that for many years after 1821 it was exactly as far from Kansas City to the new Mexico as it had been to the younger Spain. These are simple propositions in the statement, and reference may be had to the map at any time; but it is difficult enough for the imagination really to take hold of the items involved. We say "United States" today, and the mind is apt at once to sweep from ocean to ocean. But our grandparents, whether they were homekeeping or pioneers, had Spain at the back of their minds, because Spain was at the back of their country. Anyhow, today we must look overseas if we would find what might hedge us in. That search may be the duty of our governors and our philosophers, but the people at large between the oceans are not much bothering.

It was France certainly more than Spain that bothered our roving ancestors for some time with respect to the limits of British America. The pioneer came West, as who should say a piece, and then found it prudent to stop for the French Americans, and maybe turned south. Note the progress of the Gregg family. About 1682 William Gregg, from the north of Ireland, settled as a Quaker in Pennsylvania. His grandson, William Gregg, had a son named Jacob, who, becoming interested in a business way in the Quaker community of Orange County, North Carolina, finally took up residence in Orange County on Cane Creek. Jacob Gregg was living there in 1771, more or less of a Regulator-a person, that is

to say, not content with the regulations. Jacob Gregg at an advanced age removed to Arkansas, the Fort Smith or Van Buren region. His three sons had long before gone West. The eldest, Harmon Gregg, having taken a wife out of Pennsylvania (Susannah Schmelzer), settled first in Tennessee, where he lived until 1809. He then kept on to the Illinois country, and a few years afterward to Howard County, Missouri. His son Josiah, born in Tennessee, was bred a doctor of physic, but circumstances begat in him a hankering for prairie life. He was the Dr. Gregg who wrote the famous Commerce of the Prairies. He knew the great Southwest, was as far south as Aguascalientes in Mexico, and died young on the Trinity River in California the winter of 1849. The Gregg family had gone all the way West, despite of France and Spain, along with the confederate states of British America.1

Dr Gregg was in the Santa Fé trade hardly nine years, but his name will always be associated with that commerce of the prairies. Dr. David Waldo was an active Santa Fé trader for thirty years and more, and his name we know; nothing besides remaining. So much for the sharp distinction between business and literature, not to be hinting, however, that Josiah Gregg was a mediocre trader. Waldo, it is said, left Virginia for Missouri in his youth; settled on the Gasconade River, made money floating pine rafts to St. Louis, and got a medical education at the Transylvania School

'It was impossible to know anything of these facts until recently. William E. Connelley of Topeka, in his remarkable edition of Hughes's Doniphan, has cleared up the history, and now Josiah Gregg ought to appear in the biographical dictionaries. He was born in Overton County, Tennessee, July 19, 1806, and died the winter of 1849-1850. He had relations at Van Buren, Arkansas, with whom he spent some time before 1845. After publishing his Commerce of the Prairies [1844, New York and London] he lived for a while with a brother at Shreveport, Louisiana. Dr. Gregg was a bachelor.

in Kentucky. He and Gregg went upon the Southwest Trail the same year, and it is not impossible that Gregg was in some such business way the author of his own medical degree. Transylvania was there to give the training. There can be no question about that. Dr. Gregg says little of himself in his book, although that had been prepared "chiefly from a journal he had been in the habit of keeping from his youth upward.” Perhaps his medical studies, which he seems to have made no use of professionally, only served to methodize his thoughts and stir his curiosity. How interesting to follow this American trader, freighting by ships of the desert, as it were some Palmyrene or Venetian, going about his business with a mind open to the picturesque and statistical significance of what came in his way, affected by the historical sense, and moved to set down orderly his memoranda! "Not even an attempt," said Dr. Gregg in his preface, "has before been made to present any full account of the origin of the Santa Fé trade and modes of conducting it." Gregg's is no great book, but we are very much obliged to the author for performing well the important task he undertook, and letting us know a little about himself. His brother Jacob had been a member of the first wagon train from Missouri to Santa Fé, and the wagon business of the trade had led his father to settle at Independ. ence, the home base of the caravans. Josiah Gregg rather grew up with the Santa Fé trade.

During the year 1830, having been pestering perhaps a little too much with books, Josiah Gregg had a prairie life prescribed for him. So he joined the caravan of 1831 as a scientific supernumerary (like Darwin in the Beagle the same year), went to Santa Fé, very likely pushed on to Chihuahua, found the prescription greatly to his advantage, and never came home to Missouri for anything of a settled life. The near west of Spain put a spell upon him. And besides he grew to be a trader at Chihuahua, was a charterer of wagons for several years for Santa Fé and beyond, and before he quit the business was a capitalist to be reckoned with in the trade.

But Gregg was not all trader, no solid, consistent man of affairs. Henry Connelley, who had graduated in medicine at Transylvania in 1828, and had immediately after gone into business at Chihuahua, Dr. Henry Connelley (a reverend name in the Southwest) made a fortune at the trade and a political place and reputation. Gregg was a rover and a writer and a memorandum maker. His book was doubtless studied well by Remington, for the composition of the picture "Santa Fé Trail," nor can you and I do better in promoting our historical imagination of the West, than to look in upon Gregg's pages and those of John Hughes a year or two later. Missouri! Who shall frame the epic of it,—the mule state, and much besides, indeed?

As you ascend from Kaskaskia and St. Louis, when you come to Howard County on the Missouri River, you have reached the old home port of the Santa Fé trade-Franklin in Howard County was where the the trade began in time. and space, and for obvious reasons. The State of Missouri was registered as such the summer of 1821. And in September of that year Mexico cast off from Spain. Enterprising people of the Howard County region knew very well what the opportunity was, and they were not long hesitating. Two years before a St. Louis steamboat had tied up at Franklin in the month of May, (and it is worth remembering that at the same time a steamship was sailing from Savannah east); dry goods of St. Louis could therefore be shipped to Franklin most conveniently. Missouri traders knew what dry goods bought from Vera Cruz were costing at Chihuahua and Santa Fé, -no less than two and three dollars the Spanish yard for common calicoes and even bleached and brown domestic. The fall of 1821 Spain was on the tercentenary shut out at Vera Cruz, and St. Louis traders could not help but see an excellent market at Santa Fé and on beyond. So Franklin first, and then as navigation was carried farther up Missouri, Independence (almost at Kansas City) became the "general port of embarkation for every part of the great western and

northern prairie ocean." Thus wrote Dr. Gregg. In 1831, when he joined the caravan for New Mexico, Independence was the meeting place and parting of the ways for Rocky Mountain traders and trappers, emigrants to Oregon, and venturers to Santa Fé. Independence, then, was that place in Missouri where people grew especially to know the implications of the West and to devise means of bringing the cactus, the prairie dogs, and the Pacific Coast "nearer to Boston,' despite the protests of a few Bostonians.

Besides the picturesqueness of it and the dollars in it, it is this problem of transportation solved so well for a while that interests us greatly in the old commerce of the prairies to Santa Fé and Chihuahua. The wagons for long most used in the trade were manufactured at Pittsburgh. These could be shipped or driven to Independence. At first eight mules or eight oxen was the horsepower to each wagon. Later ten or twelve animals were hitched on, and a wagon cargo might run to five thousand pounds in weight. The loading of the caravan wagon was a nice business, every precaution being taken so to stow away the packages that no jolting on the road. could much disarrange them. Dr. Gregg remarks that "the ingenuity in packing has frequently been such that after a tedious journey of eight hundred miles the goods have been found to sustain much less injury than they would have experienced on a turnpike road, or from the ordinary handling of property upon our western steamboats." From the description of the wagons in Gregg it does not appear that they were arched over by canvas as Remington shows them. Dr. Gregg observes, "A pair of stout Osnaburg sheets should be spread upon each wagon, with one of sufficient width to reach the bottom of the body on each side, so as to protect the goods from driving rains."

The first objective from Independence was Council Grove, the general rendezvous, about ten days off. Thither the traders went in detached parties. The Great Caravan was organized there, the traders electing their captain, and making all need