In this episode of Dave Does History, we ride back to the early 1820s, when the American frontier was not yet a land of settlers but of merchants chasing profit across a sea of grass. The story begins with William Becknell, a man drowning in debt who set out from Missouri and ended up opening the Santa Fe Trail. His daring 1822 expedition proved that wagons could cross the Great Plains, carrying trade goods and transforming a lonely wilderness into a bustling highway of commerce.We’ll follow Becknell’s near-fatal journey across the Cimarron Cutoff, the desperate search for water, and the miraculous rescue that turned failure into triumph. This is the birth of the Santa Fe Trail—the road that carried two nations’ fortunes westward and forever changed the map of American trade.

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