named Glenn, and Captain Becknell, of Missouri, set out forthwith; and in 1824, about eighty traders, accompanied by several intelligent and cultivated Missourians, departed not only with pack-mules, which had hitherto served for the transportation of goods, but with twenty-five wheeled vehicles of which one or two were stout road wagons, the whole conveying a freight of near thirty thousand dollars in merchandise. The caravan crossed the desert-plains after an eventful journey; and some years after—as the early adventurers had experienced no serious molestations from the Indians,—a wealthier class of traders, availed themselves of the opened commerce of the Prairies and finally established the annual caravans which within recent years have departed from the neighborhood of Independence, laden with most valuable freights for the markets of Santa Fé, Chihuahua, and even the distant Fair of San Juan de los Lagos.
In time, however, the caravans, the period of their passage, and their value, became known to the savages through whose lonely territory they passed, and so many cruel attacks were made, that the United States resolved to protect them and established military convoys for the most dangerous part of the route. But these were not always of sufficient size, nor did they cover the road adequately; for the escort which accompanied the caravan of 1829, and another composed of sixty dragoons under Captain Wharton in 1834, constituted the only government protection until the year 1843, when large escorts under Captain Cook attended two different caravans as far as the Arkansas river. Since that period, the war has slightly interfered with the trade; but the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo of 1848, having given New Mexico to the United States, and a territorial government having been formed for it during the first session of the thirty-first Congress, a new and progressive era is about to dawn upon the whole of the hitherto lonely waste between the western settlements of Texas and the shores of the Pacific.
By an act approved on the 9th of September, 1850, it is provided: "That all that portion of the territory of the United States bounded as follows: