Spanish Trail

Historic route connecting Santa Fe, New Mexico, with California. It was developed in the 1830s, on the basis of routes charted in the 1770s by Spanish expeditions.

The 1776 Escalante expedition, which set out to reach Monterey, California, ventured northwest from Santa Fe past Abiquiu, to the site of Durango, Colorado. It then turned north along the Dolores River, into present-day Utah, where it crossed the Colorado River near Moab and the Green River and proceeded west to the Sevier River before turning back. The explorers mistakenly believed that either the Green River or the Sevier River was the ‘San Buenaventura’, a river that was thought to flow to the Pacific coast. In the 1830s, American and Mexican traders pushed the trail further, into southwestern Utah, past modern Cedar City, across the far northwest of Arizona. They made a rest stop at Las Vegas (‘the meadows’), Nevada, before continuing west across the Mojave Desert, to the sites of Barstow and Victorville, through the Cajon Pass, and into the Los Angeles area. The Spanish Trail became an extension of the Santa Fe Trail, and in the 1840s also an extension of the Mormon Trail, as church settlement expanded into California.