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Search for a Southern Route
Old Spanish Trail
While the California-Sonora trail was becoming a road, the elusive
direct route from new Mexico to California again was sought. Where
Garces and the Escalante-Dominguez party had pioneered paths,
Antonio Armijo's journey from New Mexico to California in 1829-
1830 on a trail that lay north of the Grand Canyon was the first
significant step in the development of the route that later became
known as the Old Spanish Trail. A larger portion of the credit for
opening the trail must go to William Wolfskill, the American
mountain man who led an expedition that included George C. Yount
from New Mexico via the Great Basin to California in 1830-183.1 ;
the Old Spanish Trail would follow Wolfskill's route more closely
than that of Armijo.
The Old Spanish Trail was more of a "central route" than a southern
one, but until the opening of shorter routes from New Mexico to
California in the early stages of the war between Mexico and the
United States in the mid-1840s, the trail, used more for trade than
emigration, was the most heavily traveled route between the two
provinces. Its principal virtue was that it lay north of hostile Indian
territory. But travel over the trail was slow, and it would lose out
after 1848 to the more southerly routes because gold-seekers were
willing to brave both deserts and hostile Indians to speed their
journeys to California.
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