Comanche National Grassland.

We also hiked at the Comanche National Grassland, which includes 440,000 acres in southeastern Colorado. 150 million years ago, during the Jurassic period, dinosaurs walked here; 1,500 years ago, ancient peoples created rock art on the canyon walls. That makes Santa Fe trail history seem recent...between 1821 and 1880 came the covered wagons, the caravans. But life had thrived on the grasslands for thousands of years.

Encountering the prairie.

After a trip to Fort Union (see below) it’s easy to find yourself imagining what a trip might have been like on the Santa Fe Trail in its 60-year heyday.

"In spring, the vast plain heaves and rolls around like a green ocean," wrote one early traveler.

The trail stretched 900 miles of the Great Plains between the Missouri and Santa Fe, peopled with traders, soldiers, gold seekers, emigrants, mountain people, hunters, guides, and families.

What did you need to make the journey successfully? Flour, sowbelly bacon, coffee, sugar, and salt. Beans, dried apples, or buffalo and other game might be occasional treats. Buffalo chips for fuel. Wagons, yokes, harnesses.

The trail crossed the hunting grounds of the Comanche, Kiowa, southern bands of Cheyenne and Arapaho, and Plains Apaches, as well as the homelands of the Osage, Kansas, Jicarilla Apache, Ute, and Pueblo Indians.

Travelers may have encountered bison herds or Plains Indians but far more so they experienced dust, mud, gnats, mosquitos, and heat. Violent weather—floods (well, swollen streams, anyway), wildfires, hailstorms, strong winds, or blizzards—could put wagon trains in peril.

Illustrations from sangres.com.