provinces and the rest of Mexico were ill
defined. Under the Constitution of 1824,
which followed the overthrow of
Emperor Agustín in 1823, the boundaries
changed somewhat. This federalist con-
stitution, which remained in force until
1835—a period sometimes called the fed-
eralist era or the First Federal Republic—
turned most Mexican provinces into
states with considerable autonomy. But
the far northern provinces were left as
territories under central control or as
parts of larger states: the territory of Alta
California; part of the state of Sonora y
Sinaloa; the territory of Nuevo México;
and part of the state of Coahuila y Texas.
Though vast on paper, this far north-
ern region was only thinly Hispanic, with
relatively small pockets of frontier
pobladores, or settlers, concentrated in
what are now California, Arizona, New
Mexico, and Texas. There were virtually
no Hispanic settlers in what are now
Nevada or Utah, then wholly part of the
Far North, or in the parts of Colorado,
Wyoming, Kansas, and Oklahoma that
were also included in the region.
Despite the sparseness of Hispanic
settlement in the Far North, the new
nation of Mexico regarded the region as a
valuable resource. Not only did it have
promise as a site for future development,
it served as a protective buffer between the
Mexican heartland and foreign powers or
Native American raiders. In particular, it
served to keep central Mexico well insu-
lated from the United States, which had
already revealed expansionist designs in
obtaining Florida and Louisiana.
On the other hand, the Far North
was a constant headache for Mexican
government, as the next two decades
would show. Precisely because the region
was so remote, thinly populated, and
weakly defended, it was easily subject to
encroachment by Great Britain, the
United States, Russia, or any other nation
or group of settlers that fancied a piece of
it. This latent instability would erupt in
the Texas Revolution and the U.S.-
Mexican War, which jointly tore most of
the Far North away from Mexico and
into American possession by 1848.
The Nuevomexicanos
Under Spanish rule, foreigners wandering
into the Far North had been regarded as
trespassers, likely candidates for the prison
cell, or calabozo. Trade with other coun-
tries was forbidden or tightly controlled.
With Mexican independence, all this
changed. Foreign traders were now wel-
come, once they paid the customs duty
and perhaps a local bribe.
Nowhere was the impact of this rel-
atively free trade more visible than in
Santa Fe, New Mexico. In 1821, almost
as soon as Mexican independence made
trade legally possible, American merchant
William Becknell led a string of pack
mules from Franklin, Missouri (part of
the United States since the 1803
Louisiana Purchase), to Santa Fe. There
he sold all his goods to the delighted
Nuevomexicanos, who gladly paid in sil-
ver for the privilege. The trail he took
had been known to the Native Americans
before Columbus and traversed by
Coronado, but it was Becknell who
turned it into the traders’ gateway known
as the Santa Fe Trail.
From 1822 throughout the period of
Mexican rule, wagon caravans rolled out
of Independence, Missouri, each and
every spring, hauling manufactured goods
along the Santa Fe Trail. Among these
goods were cloth, clothing, tools, kitchen
utensils, jewelry, buttons, clocks, combs,
needles, candles, pens, and wallpaper.
Long a rugged place where items as sim-
ple as carpenter’s nails were scarce and
even the rich lived in plain adobe houses
with nearly bare rooms, New Mexico
welcomed the abundance of manufac-
tured goods. The American traders, in
turn, rejoiced in the big profits to be
made and the silver and gold they
brought back to their own frontier, where
hard currency was scarce. They also
brought home hides and wool—products
of New Mexico’s herding industry—and
furs, especially beaver furs, products of
the trapping industry then beginning to
flourish in the region.
Many of the trappers were them-
selves Americans, mountain men living a
raw existence in the wilderness. Their
principal relaxation came in the sum-
mers spent trading and carousing at the
town fairs, particularly in Taos, located
close to the mountain waters where the
beavers lived. In their relentless search
for fur, the trappers nearly drove beavers
to extinction in the region while also
blazing trails in many areas claimed but
as yet unsettled by Mexico: Nevada,INDEPENDENCE IN THE NEW WORLD 77