(light airy music) - [Nicki] The legacy of the Santa Fe Trail is our society today.

This very rich, diverse convergence of cultures would help shape the American West.

- [Katherine] It was bringing the brink of settlement and development of not just regions of Colorado, but regions of the entire southwest.

- [Nicki] Traditionally, the narrative has been very male dominated.

All of the high profile people who traveled along this Santa Fe Trail have been men.

- [Leah] If we're always sharing the same story about the Santa Fe Trail or any other part of American history, we're leaving half of those perspectives out.

- [Nicki] That history could not have happened without the contributions of women.

They played pivotal roles, but their voices haven't been really recorded.

Part of what we're doing today is we're trying to unearth those stories.

- [Narrator] This program was made possible by the History Colorado State Historical Fund, supporting projects throughout the state to preserve, protect, and interpret Colorado's architectural and archeological treasures.

History Colorado State Historical Fund, create the future, honor the past.

With additional funding provided in memory of Deanna E. La Camera by Hassel and Marianne Ledbetter and by members like you.

Thank you.

With special thanks to the Denver Public Library, History Colorado and to these organizations.

(inquisitive music) - The Santa Fe Trail was critical to the operation and the settlement of the southwest.

In 1821, on the heels of Mexican independence from Spain, it opened up and it was basically the highway of migrants, of goods from all over the globe into the American Southwest.

- [Al] We do have this trail connecting Missouri to New Mexico, but we also have trails that go from Santa Fe to California, down to Mexico City, and small trails mostly used for trade.

- [Rebecca] The Santa Fe trail was the only way that you were going to get freight and trade goods to the forts.

It was considered to be business transportation trail.

Generally, you will see that it wasn't one that women were supposed to be traveling but that is not true of course.

There were always women along the Santa Fe Trail and they're part of the story too.

They're just not recognized.

- [Narrator 2] The women who navigated the opportunities of the trail came from vastly different backgrounds.

Their experiences varied widely depending on their race, social status, and reasons for being in this place.

The stories of three women who set foot on this crossroads of time reveal the range of experiences for 19th century American women.

A Cheyenne woman known variously by the names Mestaahehe, Mistanta, and Owl Woman, negotiated the complexity of trade between Western settlers and her people.

Julia Holmes was a white woman who chose adventure and boldness on her journey, and Cathay Williams, a black woman, also known as William Cathay, because she enlisted in the famed all black Buffalo soldiers as a man.

What unites their stories is a wilderness trail scattered with female footsteps that have long thread in the shadows of history.

- So when we think about this Santa Fe Trail in 1821 and the confluence of multiple cultures, and nations, and perspectives, we get a spectrum of different attitudes toward gender.

We have the indigenous cultures.

We get the Mexican perspective where Mexican women actually have more rights and more freedoms than Anglo women who would come through the Santa Fe Trail.

1821 represents kind of the coming together of all of those different attitudes about gender.

- So what women bring to the table are their experiences, their full bodied experiences as people of their time and we can't really know the past unless we consider them.

- The women actually had quite a bit of power, more so than there would've been on the East Coast at the time.

Women were able to own property for example.

If they spoke multiple languages, they served as translators.

They could offer mediation and negotiations.

Women were usually the ones who were processing the furs or deer skins for example.

Ultimately, they were involved in almost every facet of life.

- [Nicki] We have to think about is how tough of a journey it was.

It took about 50 days to travel from St. Louis to Santa Fe, and so you had places along the way that served as way stations where people could kind of refuel.

They could rest their animals.

They could stock up on provisions because it was a very difficult.

I mean you have an arid climate.

You have a bitter climate during the winters, and so places like Bents Fort would have tremendous importance for those migrants along the way.

- William Bent and his brother Charles had come to this region from St. Louis to establish a trading post and these people met each other.

The Cheyenne-Arapahoe met William Bent and they asked him to build a trading post on the Arkansas River.

- [Narrator 2] Completed an 1833 Bent's Fort became the main supply stop along the Santa Fe Trail, which connected St. Louis and Santa Fe.

In a place where trees can be scarce, they built with the Mexican construction technique of Adobe bricks made of mud, straw, and water.

The fort's location on the north side of the Arkansas River, put it on the United States then border with Mexico.

It became a place that partially transcended the cultural and social barriers amongst European fur traders, Mexican laborers, and Native American buffalo hunters, the three main groups that traded here.

- [Nicki] So if this enterprise was going to work, and especially somewhere like Bent's Fort along the trail, if people were going to succeed in trading furs or other goods along the trail, they had to cooperate.

If you were new to this region like the white Americans, you had to cooperate with indigenous peoples.

And so, one group that there is documented cooperation is the Cheyenne and a good example of sort of a figure who kind of bridged those worlds was Owl Woman, who in Cheyenne is Mestaahehe.

She would become the wife of William Bent, who founded Bent's Fort.

- Owl Woman was the oldest daughter of one of the most important men in the southern Cheyenne Tribe, White Thunder.

He and Bent became friends.

There was a night where there were comets in a meteor shower.

They thought the world was coming to an end but not Owl Woman's father.

He thought it was a new beginning.

- [Joseph] She was probably the very first Cheyenne woman that married an Anglo.

It was a time where it change and White Thunder knew that there was one coming.

She was a daughter of the Arrow Keep and his daughter married Bent.

- [Rebecca] This young man, because of his prospects, seemed like a very good economic match, and she was excellent match for him because she had connections.

- [Joseph] Well, most of 'em were probably her relatives too.

By having a lot of relatives in all different bands, she had more control, goods, products to share, and she knew which ones were looking for which.

So she kind of like controlled the monopoly of what was being sold away.

- [Narrator 2] White Thunder, a high priest of the Cheyenne, arranged his daughter's marriage to the very important William Bent.

with as many as 20,000 native Americans camped outside of Bent's Fort, many wanting to trade buffalo robes for goods.

Owl Woman was positioned to be a power broker of sorts.

- She was unique because she was really a culture bridger, Native American and European-Anglo culture, but also with the Mexican traders and the other tribes.

- [Dee] Owl Woman was involved in everything.

She was somewhat of a business partner.

She was a vital part of all of these things that were going on: economic, political, social.

It was Owl Woman.

- [Nicki] She is known to have been kind of a bridge builder or a peacemaker between the two peoples and represented this sort of connection, and also represented on William Bents' side, the need for these American men to marry into or to assimilate into native cultures.

- [Rebecca] They produced four children.

Mary was the oldest, Robert, George, and Julia.

She died at the birth of her last child Julia.

The Cheyenne custom for burial was that the person would be put into a tree, a platform and a tall tree with their goods.

Everything they would need for the next life.

The air and the birds, nature would take you back.

(sad music) - [Narrator 2] It is not known for certain, but Owl Woman was probably only 37 when she died.

She had nurtured peace on the Colorado plains at a time when the United States was increasingly at war with Native Americans and with itself.

The so-called American Indian wars started.

Indigenous people were targeted for forced assimilation, erasure of their cultures, and genocide.

With the Civil War looming, it was a dangerous time to be a Native American or African American woman on the Santa Fe Trail.

A young black woman named Cathay Williams would one day find herself on the Santa Fe Trail.

And like Owl Woman, the color of her skin would determine much of what she would experience in life and on this trail.

Born to a mother in slavery and a free father, Cathay was legally a slave.

- So she was taken as contraband by the Union Army and as a young person, she was a support person.

- [Narrator 3] When the war broke out and the United States soldiers came to Jefferson City, they took me and other color folks with them at Little Rock.

Colonel Benton of the 13 Army Corps was the officer that carried us off.

I did not want to go.

He wanted me to cook for the officers, but I always been a house girl and did not know how to cook.

- [Stephen] She was a cook but eventually she was taught how to fire a weapon.

And then, one day they decided that wearing a dress around the campfire was dangerous.

So they gave her a pair of pants and she decided at that point, I will never put on a dress again.

- [Narrator 2] This may have been when Cathay Williams decided she would have more choices as a man than as a woman.

Even once freed after the Emancipation Proclamation, what job could she hold?

The army was all she'd known her adult life.

So she did what a woman was not legally able to do.

She enlisted as a man in the now famed all black regiment known as the Buffalo Soldiers.

- [Stephen] Now, Cathay Williams had pretty good size.

In fact, she was taller than most of the men, so didn't have to go through a physical.

The recruiting officer said, "Sure, we'll sign you up."

Her approach was to not be outstanding or not be less than average, but just to be an average soldier.

- [Rebecca] She joined the very first infantry unit, the 38th Company A at Jefferson's Barracks in 1866.

She just flipped her name from Cathay Williams to William Cathay.

Didn't really say she was a man, they just assumed she was a man and that was how she became a Buffalo soldier.

She probably walked close to a thousand miles along the Santa Fe Trail in her first year.

- The Buffalo Soldiers actually were not formed as a formal organization until 1866.

The job itself was not any more dangerous than being any other soldier.

The danger was being a black soldier.

They did face some opposition.

So many times a discipline was just so much more harsh than it was for other soldiers.

And then at that time, there were the Indian Wars and Native Americans nationally were defending their native land.

There was a conflict because their duty was to guard and protect wagon trains, but they were also fighting another minority group, Native Americans.

- Cathay Williams and other Buffalo soldiers travel along the Santa Fe Trail.

They didn't necessarily all go on horseback.

Their stories about Cathay walking along the trail and as a result she had a lot of foot injuries because the terrain is harsh.

- She was able to do that for two years until she became very ill, and they discovered that she was a female and that's when she was mustered out.

- So she got an honorable discharge and from there she went to Port Union, up in New Mexico for a while, and then she moved to Pueblo.

That's where she got married and her husband took her horses and her money and she wound up coming into Trinidad, Colorado.

- [Rebecca] She was checked into the Catholic hospital there and they amputated all of her toes and part of one foot.

So she asked the military for help.

Some people did receive a military pension.

But as a Buffalo soldier and now as a woman, she applied for military pension and she did not get it.

Well, she thought she could get benefits or help was because she had an honorable discharge from the United States Military.

Cathay Williams died of complications of diabetes in Trinidad about 1892.

- Cathay is significant for a number of reasons.

We have a woman of color who was not only able to enlist in the army as a man and get away with it for years, but she was also the first, and as far as I know the only known female Buffalo soldier.

- I respect and honor her.

I look at her as if she was my sister.

- [Stephen] She, at that time, that was the only route that she had to survive and to be on her own.

- [Narrator 2] There was precedent for a woman disguising herself as a man.

In the Revolutionary War, like Cathay, Deborah Sampson evaded detection.

Like Cathay, she received an honorable discharge.

But unlike the black female slave turned soldier, Deborah received a full military pension.

Race played a role for every woman who set foot on the Santa Fe Trail.

For white women, it meant choices.

For Julia Archibald Holmes, it meant the freedom of her convictions.

- [Katherine] Her family went to church to hear Reverend Henry Ward Beecher talk not only about very strong New England religious beliefs, but also the evils of slavery.

So for Julia, fighting slavery and having all sorts of causes, social causes.

And so, everything that she does is connected to all of those ideas of her day and place.

John Brown is the most famous anti-slavery or abolitionist leader who's willing to do whatever it takes.

One of John Brown's lieutenants is a man named James Holmes.

They got married and one of the things he wanted to do was go west on the Santa Fe Trail.

So off goes our hero on the Santa Fe Trail.

One thing you need to know about Julia on the Santa Fe Trail is you need to understand what the Bloomer Costume is.

The Bloomer Costume of Julia's day was reform dress.

It was meant to be an outfit that said women can be equal to men.

This will be a campaign for women's equality and the point was having both legs show.

She decided she was going to wear this on the journey along the Santa Fe trail, so that she would be making a statement about women's equality.

She also has decided she's going to keep a diary of sorts by writing letters to her mother, and she is not only wearing this costume that probably looked really strange, not just because other women on this trail are not wearing it but also because she made her own with different calico fabrics.

So I sort of imagined this brightly colored, patchwork outfit.

She also decides along the way that not only is her costume going to make a statement, but that she should be treated equally along the trail.

She writes that the men are expected in this wagon train to do guard duty every night on the expectation perhaps an Indian attack, although that never happened.

So she decides that she is going to insist that she alternate or have similar shared duty with her husband.

So she's doing that kind of effort all along the way to keep insisting about women's equality.

- She actually walked of her own free will, 10 or more miles a day beside the wagon because she wanted to.

She could explore, look for flowers and things.

She was very interested in everything around her.

And then when they got to Garden of the Gods, two men decided they wanted to climb so she and her husband went too.

Took them five days.

They got snowed on despite the fact it was the first week of August and she climbed all the way up there and nothing could stop her.

- [From Julia's Journal] Soon after leaving Bent's, we caught the first view of Pikes Peak.

We stopped and took a good long look.

We stood upon the mountain and gazed upon his promise land.

It was to us everything.

It stood for the whole country, from Mexico to our northern line.

It represented gold and plenty of it.

It spoke of influence, power, and position.

The scene becomes one of solemn grandeur.

- [Katherine] So what Julia sees is all of this spectacular scenery and feels very, very proud of being the first white woman to climb Pikes Peak.

We don't know how many indigenous women might have climbed at the top of Pikes Peak.

We also don't know how many Hispanic women might have climbed at the top of Pikes Peak.

- Then after that, her family went to Taos.

She ended up having four kids.

She picked up Spanish and became a correspondent for papers back east and eventually ended up divorcing her husband.

Two of the children died, moved to Washington, D.C.

In the sixties and seventies, she became a suffragette.

She was a secretary for the National Women's Organization to get the vote, and a friend of Susan B. Anthony.

A free thinker, a journalist, a mountaineer, you name it.

This woman wasn't afraid to try things.

She's quite extraordinary and I'm glad that she's been recognized for her unusual approach to life because she was very unusual for her day, brave lady.

(solemn music) - [Narrator 2] The Santa Fe Trail's heyday was coming to an end.

Railroads sped up the colonization of the west by white settlers, choking off the natural migration paths of Native Americans and the buffalo.

- [Joseph] It was a time for change.

Everybody was being pushed to the west from the east.

So when they did the railroads, buffalo won't cross a railroad track.

He just stopped.

So he stop, we stop.

- [Al] The Santa Fe Trail does exist as a national scenic byway.

There are numerous historic sites along the trail that you can visit.

Bent's Old Fort is a national historic site.

Trinidad History Museum is also a stop along the byway.

These places are important because they're historically significant.

But by being able to visit them, you get a tactile way to experience history, to learn about everyone's stories and learn how they still impact us today.

- [Nicki] So it is absolutely vital for us to preserve the memory of the Santa Fe Trail and as much as we can to preserve physical parts of the Santa Fe trail because that instructs us.

Seeing the wheel ruts, seeing the pathways that people traveled and really encouraging, especially youth to understand what it took to travel from St. Louis to Santa Fe.

- [Narrator 2] The fort standing along the historic Santa Fe trail today is a painstaking reconstruction of the original Adobe castle that beckoned people of all backgrounds to come to trade.

Valuable garbage deposits have been excavated and reveal much about the daily life of Bent's Fort residents.

Archeologists have scoured through thousands of artifacts to determine everything from the thickness of the walls to some highly valued pipes, to the seemingly incongruous English ceramics used for dining.

- Bent's Fort, I think is one of the gems in Colorado as far as preservation go.

What did Bent's For represent at a time when there were no cell phones, there were no cars, there were no highways, we just had this trail right?

And so, Bent's Fort is such an instructive piece of our history.

And in preserving that, we are preserving for future generations who we are.

- [Al] The legacy of the Santa Fe Trail and the women who interacted and worked on it is their descendants, the culture in which they lived in, it's all still here.

People are still deeply connected to the Santa Fe Trail and their roots.

One of the amazing initiatives that we have in Trinidad is the local Buffalo soldiers are working to get a statue of Cathay Williams placed within the city.

- [Haskell] When I located this plaque and I was just like, "Okay, overwhelmed."

Well, during the times and the seasons that the history museum is not open, she's not visible.

It was her that inspired me.

- [Al] It's important for us to have a statue for a woman of color, for an incredible historical figure, accessible to everyone year round.

- Despite the obstacles over the years and the struggles that these indigenous people had to overcome, this particular group of people, descendants of White Thunder, descendants of Owl Woman, their descendants live today.

They're artists, they're storytellers, they still maintain that Cheyenne traditional culture and their sharing it with people.

It's no surprise that her name, her Cheyenne name, was chosen to replace the name of a mountain in Colorado in 2021, that was a derogatory term for indigenous women, and they changed that to Owl Woman's Cheyenne name.

And so 200 years after her birth, she still has some influence today.

- Oh, renaming it after her, like it brought her back to life, brought her story, her people alive.

- [Nicki] You could argue that a Santa Fe Trail, it was a foundational phenomenon or period or process.

I mean it was all of those things and you see this very rich, diverse convergence of cultures that would help shape the American West.

(spirited uplifting music)