Excerpt from A Son of the Plains A brown line of sandy track six hundred miles long, and fifteen to fifty yards broad, beaten out of the prairie by the hoofs of countless oxen, sheep, and horses, and the feet of men, - such is that great emigrants' thoroughfare from East to West known as the Santa Fe trail. The source of the trail is at Van Buren City, Arkan sas; it ends at Santa Fe, the capital of New Mexico, and so vast has been the traffic over it that even the tough prairie grass has yielded up its life, and not a blade is left upon the track for fully four hundred miles. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.