Spanish Traders - National Historic Trail

Spanish traders made regular visits from New Mexico to barter with the Utes for animal hides and slaves. In the late 1820s, fur trappers and others of whom included Antoine Robidoux, Ewing Young, Etienne Provost, William Wolfskill, George Yount, Jose Martin, Jedediah Smith, Kit Carson and Ceran St. Vrain traveled westward.

The peak usage of The Old Spanish Trail was between the years of 1830 and 1850. Traders regularly traveled the trail, trading guns, horses and trinkets for Indian slaves. The Indian slaves were then sold as domestic servants at both ends of the trail. Women and girls brought the highest prices, some as much as $400.00

The northern part of the trail went through Mountain Meadows during its prime between 1829 and 1848. It enabled traders to load their mules with a variety of goods from Santa Fe each fall and return from California each spring with Chinese goods, more mules and horses to sell at markets in Missouri.

After 1848, the trail became more of a migration route. The first wagons to use the trail were members of the Mormon Battalion after the Mexican War, on their way to Salt Lake City, Utah from San Diego, California. This opened a new emigrant wagon route known as the "California Road," or The Mormon Trail.
Gold seekers, California travelers, and LDS pioneers used The Old Spanish Trail. The wagon road shifted to the east side of the meadows to bypass Magotsu Creek. It was this route to California that brought the Baker-Fancher party to the Mountain Meadows in September 1857.
The trail followed along the west side of the Mountain Meadows to a campsite at the south end of the valley, then down Magotsu Creek.

A lot of tragedy on The Old Spanish Trail included the enslavement of abducted Paiute Indian women, children and the renowned Mountain Meadows Massacre near Enterprise, Utah.

• The Dominguez-Escalante Expeditions Journal:

Through Colorado, Utah, Arizona, and New Mexico in 1776

• I Walked to Zion:
- Young Pioneers on the Mormon Trail

• The Gathering of Zion:
- The Story of the Mormon Trail

• National Geographic's Guide to:
- Lewis and Clark Trail

• Hiking Historic Trails
- Utah's Favorite Hiking Trails

• Scenic Driving - Travel guides
- Scenic Driving in Utah

• Historical reading
- The Old Spanish Trail

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