Texas Panhandle branches of the Santa Fe Trail

Caprock Chronicles is edited weekly by Jack Becker a Librarian at Texas Tech University Libraries. This week’s article was written by Dr. Clint Chambers a distant relative of Jack Stilwell, who crossed the Panhandle many times on his way to Santa Fe or Kansas City. A soon to be published book, “Comanche Jack Stilwell: Army Scout and Plainsman,” coauthored by Dr. Chambers and Dr. Paul Carlson, is due to be publish in 2019 by the University of Oklahoma Press.

Modern maps of the Santa Fe Trail nearly always show two branches of the historic trail from Kansas City to Santa Fe. Both routes left Kansas City, moved southwest and struck the Arkansas River just upstream from present-day Dodge City, Kansas.

From there the routes divided. The Cimarron Route crossed the Arkansas and moved southwest through southern Kansas, the Oklahoma Panhandle and then into New Mexico.

The Mountain route followed the Arkansas River to Bent’s Fort in present-day Colorado, turned southwest, climbed through Raton Pass and into New Mexico. The branches rejoined at La Junta (modern Watrous) and followed the same track into Santa Fe.

In 1863, Santa Fe traders developed two new, but temporary branches, which transversed the Texas Panhandle and cut about 200 miles off the distance between Kansas City and the newly established Bosque Redondo Reservation at Fort Sumner, New Mexico.

Bosque Redondo had been established as a reserve for captured Apaches and Navajos after the end of the Navajo War. The federal government needed to supply them with food, equipment, clothes, and other goods.

With approximately 9,000 Navajos and Apaches to feed, and not enough food crops grown in New Mexico to feed them, the government hired freighting contractors to supply the Indians’ needs, and so the shorter paths were quickly developed.

From near future Dodge City, the united Panhandle branches crossed the Arkansas River and followed Crooked Creek in southwestern Kansas, crossed the Cimarron River and moved to the Beaver River in what is today the Panhandle of Oklahoma.

Here the Crooked Creek branch crossed the Beaver, moved south and waded through the head of Wolf Creek in the Texas Panhandle and continued south to Adobe Walls on the north side of the Canadian River. From Adobe Walls the trail tracked west to Atascosa and crossed to the south side of the Canadian and followed the river to Fort Bascom (established in 1863), located about 40 miles north of Bosque Redondo.

The Palo Duro branch, rather than cross the Beaver River, separated from the Crooked Creek branch and moved west up the Beaver and crossed it at the junction of Palo Duro Creek, which entered the south side of the Beaver River. It followed the Palo Duro Creek (not to be confused with Palo Duro Canyon), southwest through the Texas Panhandle before turning west to stay on the north side of the Canadian for a distance and then crossed the big river to cut to Fort Bascom.

From Fort Bascom, traders moved either west to Gallinas Springs on the Pecos River and eventually Santa Fe or south to Fort Sumner and Bosque Redondo.

Short-lived Fort Bascom had been established to guard Santa Fe caravans crossing through the Texas Panhandle. Soldiers at the fort kept a check on Comancheros (Hispanic-Pueblo traders who operated on the Plains) and Plains Indians.

At the newly established Fort Bascom, wagon trains bound for the United States combined and the government provided them with a military escort to Fort Larned, Kansas, located north of the Arkansas River. Soldiers also accompanied caravans bound from Larned to Bascom.

Each year, the Texas Panhandle branches carried tons of food stuffs, especially corn and wheat, to Bosque Redondo. But it was not enough food to keep the Indians properly nourished and the reservation was too arid to allow Navajos to successfully grow their own crops.

The reservation was inadequate in nearly every way. Apaches departed about the time the Navajos arrived (late 1863) and the Navajos suffered from the terrible conditions.

In 1868, the government closed Bosque Redondo and the huge wagon trains of supplies from the northeast were no longer needed. Navajos returned to their traditional homelands in northwestern New Mexico and northeastern Arizona, where they rebuilt their lives.

The Texas Panhandle branches of the Santa Fe Trail, however, were not neglected. They became important in what has been called a “wagon road economy” between the Panhandle and Dodge City.

Buffalo hunters in the 1870s made good use of the well-marked routes and in the 1880s cattlemen likewise used them to trail livestock to Dodge City.

From 1863 to 1867, Jack Stilwell when a teenager served as a teamster on the Texas Panhandle branches, but he also worked the other Santa Fe trails, spending winters in Santa Fe and traveling between Santa Fe and Kansas City twice a year. In 1893, he recalled that “Freighters discussed every route as which was better, shorter, more convenient and above all safest from Indians.” When a wagon train was bound from Kansas to Bosque Redondo, he suggested, the little-known Texas Panhandle branches of the Santa Fe Trail were best.