On Saturday, January 22, 1853, the front page of the Santa Fe Weekly Gazette contained an advertisement offering supplies to people traveling to Santa Fe. The ad had been placed by Daniel Boone’s grandson, Albert Gallatin Boone, and stated that Boone has “an acquaintance of many years” with the Trail.

In fact, Boone was more than acquainted with Western travel. He’d served with fur trapper William H. Ashley in the mid-1820s, traveled a number of times across the Santa Fe Trail, and participated in the Indian conflicts in Michigan territory in the early 1830s.

Born in April 1806, Boone was almost 47 when he placed his ad in the Gazette. By then, he’d moved from the adventurous life to the mercantile and supplied travelers as diverse as Washington Irving and John C. Fremont.

Boone’s presence in Santa Fe in late 1852, when he placed the Gazette ad, seems to have been a bit of an anomaly. He had stores in Westport and at Council Grove and may have been on a trading mission—or perhaps a sales trip—when he spoke to the Gazette publishers.

He eventually did go West permanently, but not until 1860 and then to Colorado. In late 1861, he founded the town of Boone east of Pueblo, on the Arkansas River. He also became involved in Colorado politics, which included serving as Indian agent at Fort Lyon, near Christopher “Kit” Carson’s final home.

In fact, Boone accompanied Carson on Kit’s final trip to Washington D.C. to confer with the Commissioner of Indian Affairs in February 1868, shortly before Carson’s death. This was yet another trip over the Santa Fe Trail, though in the opposite direction of the travelers he was outfitting in 1853.

Boone himself died sixteen years later at La Veta, Colorado, having more than proved that he was acquainted with the Santa Fe Trail.

Source: Leroy R Hafen, The Mountain Men and the Fur Trade of the Far West, Arthur H Clark: Spokane, 2003; Santa Fe Weekly Gazette, January 22, 1853; Jerry D. Thompson, A Civil War History of the New Mexico Volunteers & Militia, UNM Press: Albuquerque, 2015.