Pike thought he had found the head of the Red River when after a toilsome and dangerous march he reached the headwaters of the Rio Grande.

But it was not our river.

It belonged to Spain, as he learned to his sorrow, when he marched all the way to Chihuahua in old Mexico and lay there during certain weary months.
It was Pike's story of the far Southwest that first started the idea of the commerce of the Santa Fe Trail.

In that day geography was a human thing, a thing of vital importance to all men.

Men did not read the stock markets; they read stories of adventure, tales of men returned from lands out yonder in the West.