Old Spanish Trail .. - This trail was a route from Santa Fe, New Mexico, northwest to about Castle Dale, Utah then southwest to Los Angeles, California. A trade route was needed to move goods and information between the settlement at Santa Fe and the coast of California where the mission system was being built. Rivera was shown a trail by the local Native Americans which became part of this historical trail. It took Antonio Armijo 84 days to travel from Abiquiu, New Mexico, to Los Angeles in that first pack train in 1829-30. Escalante and Garces had travelled through the area. In 1829 Jedediah Smith explored and laid out the trail that was to become a major thoroughfare for mule trains and, later, wagon trains. John C. Fremont returned back east on the OST (as it is referred to in some modern documents). http://www.americanwest.com/trails/pages/oldsptrl.htm The Oregon Trail .. On to Oregon! It all began with a crude network of rutted traces across the land from the Mississippi River that was used by nearly 400,000 people. Today the 2,170 mile Oregon Trail still evokes an instant image, a ready recollection of the settlement of this continent, of the differences between American Indians and white settlers, and of new horizons. In 1840 only three states existed west of the Mississippi River. Maine's boundary with Canada was undefined. The western boundaries of the Nation lay roughly along the Continental Divide. Within 10 years the United States and Great Britain had drawn a boundary that stretched from the Atlantic to the Pacific. The western boundary moved from the Rocky Mountains to the Pacific Ocean. In another 40 years successive waves of emigrants completely eliminated any sense of frontier, changed the way of life of the American Indians, and ravaged many wild animal species, especially the herds of buffalo. Plows and barbed wire subdued the prairies. Transcontinental railroads knitted the great distances together. The first Europeans to see the trans-Mississippi West were the mountain men, trappers, and the maritime explorers along the west coast. In Canada, the Hudson's Bay Company fur frontier was approaching the Columbia River basin. In 1812 John Jacob Astor established Astoria at the mouth of the Columbia in a countermove and sent Robert Stuart overland to carry dispatches east. Stuart found South Pass by following a Crow Indian Trail. Only 7,000 feet above sea level, with easy gradients. South Pass has an attractive geographic proximity to the upper reaches of the Platte River. Both were determining factors in the routing of the Oregon trail. The early frontiersmen found the passes, crossed the great rivers, and defined the vast reaches of the western interior. From the beginning these explorers contributed to a growing campaign to make the Oregon Country a part of either the United States or Great Britain according to their own sometimes confused loyalties. For additional information: http://www.americanwest.com/trails/pages/oretrail.htm