Trail

Chicago Portage National Historic Park

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Way back in 1673, French explorers Louis Jolliet and Father Jacques Marquette were preparing to travel east to return to Canada after exploring the Mississippi River. Though the statue wrongly implies that Marquette pointed out the route, their Native American guides showed them a shortcut, by traveling up the Illinois River and portaging (carrying) their canoes between some muddy lakes to Lake Michigan. Marquette realized that if there were a canal, weeks-long journeys would reduce to days. 175 years later, the government finally built the canal, and suddenly, Chicago became one of the largest and most important transportation hubs and cities in the US.

The site itself is in a small woods between the Des Plaines and Chicago Rivers, and as part of Chicago’s river greenways, it’s managed by Cook County in affiliation with the NPS. The canal itself is 100 miles long with a bike trail, and there is a 1 mile canal boat tour in LaSalle at the Illinois River end. A non-profit association runs summer boat tour as well as the larger Illinois and Michigan Canal National Heritage Area, which includes Chicago Portage, the Pullman National Historical Park and promotes tourism to neighboring communities and parks. The canal is a key part of the Great Loop, a boat trip around the eastern part of the country, from the Great Lakes down the Mississippi, around Florida, up the eastern seaboard to New York, and back to the Great Lakes.

El Camino Real de Tierra Adentro

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The Plaza Santo Domingo in the historic center of Mexico City is the southern terminus of ‘The Royal Road of the Interior Land’, a World Heritage Site. As you can see above, some vendors still use traditional market stands on this trade trail first developed by pre-Columbian empires. The whole trail was originally a native trading route for turquoise, obsidian and feathers, and after the Spanish conquest, it was used for military, religious expansion and for silver. From this plaza, the road runs north through San Miguel de Allende and Guanajuato all the way through El Paso (‘the pass’) to Santa Fe (‘holy faith’). The US section—with the same Spanish name—is a national historic trail.

In the background is the Palace of the Inquisition, which arrived from Spain to punish the son of Hernán Cortés, Martín, who threatened independence in 1566. Public burnings of witches and heretics were common for ~250 years, until Mexican Independence ended the practice in 1820. The ‘palace’ now houses a UNAM medical museum, although there is a small gory museum of the inquisition a few blocks away. Mexico City is the largest and oldest city in North America, and it is well worth visiting to be able to walk in the footsteps of history.

Bent’s Old Fort National Historic Site

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Yes, there’s also a new fort, and no, I didn’t go there. The fort is a beautiful reconstruction made for the US Bicentennial. You might notice the fire damage around the edges. Just a few days earlier, a fire (under investigation) burned the fields and trees surrounding the fort. Fortunately, the fire department and rangers saved the fort and the animals. Even though I could still smell smoke, the ranger/ volunteer firewoman gave a full tour in period costume.

The Bents were merchants who traded buffalo bison hides and other goods on the Santa Fe trail. The fort was more of a commercial trading post than an active military base, but the lines were blurred. Kit Carson spent some of his early years around here hunting shooting bison. The US government used forts along the trail to protect the mail and to replace the Natives with white settlers.

Racism drove cultural hegemony. Before the arrival of Europeans, the Native Americans built homes, ate bison, hunted, fished, and grew mixed crops of corn, beans & squash. The superior settlers introduced a completely new way of using the land by building homes, eating beef, hunting, fishing and growing wheat. Oh wait, that’s exactly the same.

Fort Union National Monument

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Not much remains of the largest Union fort in the west. But there’s plenty of history here. This was a critical supply base to keep the Confederacy from expanding into the southwest. Some of the Navajo who were driven from their homes during the Long Walk were imprisoned here. Here was the largest and most advanced hospital in the west. Soldiers and cavalry guarded both branches of the Santa Fe trail from here, once trading and migration routes for Natives, then for settlers whose wagon ruts can still be seen in the earth, then for the mail, and finally for the railroad, which still bears the name in the logo BNSF.

On the drive out to the site, a pronghorn stood in the road and stared at me, perhaps not frightened by my relatively quiet and zero emission electric car. Although I didn’t get a photo, I got a careful look at it and confirmed its identity with the park volunteer. Turns out they’re not antelope but related to giraffe. Again, everything I learned about the west, where “the antelope play” was wrong. There aren’t any antelope in North America. The pronghorn are the last survivors of human hunting among similar species in North America, due to their speed. Humans are increasingly lethal to all other species, and by changing our climate so quickly, we will make most species on earth extinct within a few decades. I wonder what our ancestors who traveled this trail would say if they could see how quickly we are devastating the planet.