Santa Fe Trail Net"EVERYTHING IS READY" FOR SFTNet"The Santa Fe Trail lives on!" Welcome to SFTNet, the latest installment in the Santa Fe Trail saga. This service is designed for trail enthusiasts, students, researchers, backpackers, in short, anyone interested in historical or contemporary developments along the Santa Fe Trail. What is the Santa Fe Trail? As many who read this introduction will know, the Santa Fe Trail is an ancient land route between the desert southwest of what is now the United States and the prairies and plains of central North America. In the southwest it was also part of a longer route that ran along the Rio Grande into what is now northern Mexico. American Indian peoples used the route to trade agricultural products from the Rio Grande Valley and the bounty of the Plains, such as dried buffalo meat and buffalo hides. When the Spanish conquistador Onates arrived in New Mexico in 1598, he and his soldiers followed this ancient route, exploring the plains and trading with local people. Over the next two centuries the Spanish gained a deep knowledge of the plains and routes between the Mississippi-Missouri river systems and the Southwest. Then, in 1821, a Missouri trader, William Becknell, arrived in Santa Fe along what would become known as the historic route of the Santa Fe Trail. He opened the Santa Fe Trail as a trade route between what was then ...