How a Fight for Independence Helped Create the Santa Fe Trail

In ‘This Week in History,’ a priest calls for independence, America buys Louisiana, and a timely meeting leads a trader to a historic path.

A wagon train forms a defensive circle at Camp Comanche, a traders' camp on the Santa Fe Trail, between the North Fork River and the Canadian River. A line of soldiers guards the encampment from attack. An engraving by Lossing from Josiah Gregg's "Commerce of the Prairies: or the Journal of a Santa Fe Trader." MPI/Getty Images

It had been more than a decade since Father Miguel Hidalgo y Costilla ordered the church bells of Our Lady of Sorrows Church in Mexico rung at 2:30 a.m. The fiery priest had summoned his parishioners to the church on the morning of Sept. 16, 1810, to convince them to revolt against the new Spanish monarchy. More than two years before Hidalgo’s call to revolt, Napoleon Bonaparte’s forces invaded Spain, and he had installed his brother, Joseph, as its king, and therefore, Mexico’s king as well. “Death to bad government!” Hidalgo shouted.

Miguel Hidalgo proclaimed national independence in Dolores, Mexico. Public Domain