122 An Indigenous Peoples' History of the United States
interest in trading in Mexico. Pike's account of the potential profits
to be made inspired them to set out to capture that trade.9
US traders would help pave the way to US political control of
northern Mexico through what came to be known as the "Ameri
can party of Taos." Christopher Houston "Kit" Carson would play
a major role in the success of the US invasion of northern Mex
ico as he continued work as a colonial mercenary. Born in 1809 in
Kentucky, Carson was a fur trapper and entrepreneur, as well as a
noted Indian hater and killer, who had left his family's homestead
in Missouri for New Mexico at age sixteen. Most of the US citizens
who made up the American party, including Carson, married into
wealthy Spanish-identified families in New Mexico who had not
favored independence from Spain, creating a strong Anglo affinity
within the local ruling class. The goal of this clique was to attract,
and thus monopolize, the trade in furs with Indigenous and other
trappers, with the ultimate goal of US annexation. As a magnet, the
traders would offer low-priced manufactured goods, from clothing
to kitchenware, tools, and furniture. St. Louis was connected to
transatlantic trading houses in cities on the East Coast, so it had the
advantage of better variety and quality of goods than those of Chi
huahua traders, who relied on the declining port of Veracruz. Bent's
Fort (near present-day La Junta, Colorado) became the economic
center for the fur trade in northern New Mexico, rivaling only John
Jacob Astor's American Fur Company in North America. Missouri
merchants circumvented the Mexican prohibition against exports
of silver and gold (lifted briefly for silver between 1828 and 1835)
through smuggling and bribery. 1^0
St. Louis soon replaced Chihuahua as the entrepot for the north
ern Mexico trade, and the elite of Mexico's northern provinces be
came parties to the US objective of incorporating the territory into
the United States. As early as 1824, Missouri senator Thomas Hart
Benton introduced a bill in the US Senate on behalf of citizens of
Missouri for a US government survey of the Santa Fe Trail to the
Mexican border. In 1832, President Andrew Jackson began using
US troops to protect caravans of merchandise on the Santa Fe Trail
going to northern Mexico from possible interference by Indigenous
peoples whose territories they crossed without permission.