"Baird, Chambers and McKnight followed the course marked for them by Lieutenant Pike, and that course became the great Santa Fé trail. The Atchison, Topeka & Santa Fé R. R. follows practically the same course. If any one is entitled to credit for the selection of the route, Lieutenant Pike ought to have it. However, my purpose is to ask you to correct the name Beard to read Baird. If one will refer to 'American State Papers,' Vol. 4, folio 207, and Executive Papers, p. 197, 8th Vol., 15th Congress, he will see that it is Baird."
This communication would seem to a certain extent to discount the claims on reputation of William Becknell, generally known as the "father of the Santa Fé trail." It ascribes the credit for the original selection of the Arkansas River route to Pike, with what justice we may ourselves determine as well as any. Our venturesome Southerners, of the Baird, McKnight and Chambers party, had lain in jail for nine years before John McKnight, the brother of Robert McKnight, in the year 1821, undertook the long journey to Chihuahua, which seems to have resulted in the setting free of all these Americans. Coming back to the United States over the Arkansas River trail, Baird and the two McKnights met the Ohio man, Hugh Glenn, and his associate or friend, Jacob Fowler, who were already at Taos, regardless of the ill-fortune of their predecessors in the hazardous game of prairie commerce. Becknell himself did not start out until 1821, and he did not intend to trade in Santa Fé, but only went thence after he had met some Mexicans on the headwaters of the Arkansas, who persuaded him to take his goods to Santa Fé instead of trading them among the Indians. Hugh Glenn and Becknell were thus both at Santa Fé during the winter of 1821-22.
That following summer Braxton Cooper and his sons, as well as Becknell, made trips to Santa Fé, and it seems to have been on this second trip that Becknell attained the distinction commonly accorded him. He took three wagons through to Santa Fé, and instead of hugging the Arkansas clear out to the mountains, he struck off southwest toward San Miguel, by way of the Cimarron desert, the risky but shorter route to which the later traders adhered ever after, in spite of surveys and all else. It is really only upon the ground of his wagons and this cutoff angle that Becknell is entitled to the glory of his title as "father of the Santa Fé trail."