Santa Fe Trader

• Outfit in Missouri: wagons, a team of oxen or mules, hands to drive and herd, provisions, water casks and spare axletrees, then fill the wagons with trade goods, in units of 100 lb. An ordinary wagon carries 30 units; in 1839 you can also buy the large 50-unit wagons. Suggested outfit fills in a sensible one you can adjust.
• Travel stop by stop. Before each leg you see the miles, days, food and water it will take, what it will do to your animals and wagons, and the odds that something happens on the way. Long drives are faster but wear out the team.
• Choose when something happens. Every choice shows its cost and odds before you commit. At the Arkansas you pick your route: the Cimarron is shorter but has a long dry stretch; the Mountain Route is longer and rough over Raton Pass, with water and grass.
• Sell in Santa Fe after customs. Each unit you sell brings a little less, and every caravan that reached town before you has pushed prices down. You can go on to Chihuahua, a deeper market, at the cost of a long road and more risk.
• Come home. Buy provisions for the road back. Your score is your profit and how many of your people came home with you.
• Keys: Enter or T travel on, R lay over a day, L switch between steady and long drives, 1–4 pick a choice on a card, N new venture, Esc close. Your venture saves after every move.

Mexico won its independence in 1821 and, unlike Spain, welcomed outside trade.¹ That year William Becknell of Missouri went out to Santa Fe with a few companions, and Josiah Gregg’s table of the trade lists the first wagons in 1824.²³ Gregg made eight expeditions across the plains and wrote the fullest account, Commerce of the Prairies (1844). Franklin, Missouri, he wrote, “seems truly to have been the cradle of our trade”; Independence soon took the lead, by 1827 according to the National Park Service and toward 1831 by Gregg’s account.²⁴

Gregg’s table puts Santa Fe 775 miles from Independence by the Cimarron route.² Traders went out to Council Grove in small parties and organized there, electing a captain and setting a night guard of eight watches; the grove was also the last good timber for spare axletrees.² U.S. commissioners met the Osage there in 1825 and gave the place its name. In that treaty, and in one with the Kansa six days later, the road through their lands was made “forever free” to citizens of the United States and Mexico, in return for $500 in money or merchandise and another $300 in merchandise.²⁵⁶

Past the Arkansas the Cimarron route crossed a waterless plain of “over fifty miles”, and Gregg advised a water cask for every wagon.² The Mountain Route, by Bent's Fort (built in 1833) and Raton Pass, had more dependable water but an arduous climb, and was about 100 miles longer.¹⁴⁷ South of Santa Fe, Chihuahua lay about 550 miles further, past the Jornada del Muerto, nearly eighty miles without water.³

The trail crossed the hunting grounds and homelands of the Osage, Kansa, Comanche, Kiowa, Cheyenne, Arapaho and other peoples.⁸ At Camp Holmes in 1835 Comanche leaders, and at Fort Gibson in 1837 Kiowa leaders, signed treaties letting Americans pass through on their way to Mexico.⁹¹⁰ Gregg bought mules from Comanches in 1839, each paid for with a small assortment of goods, and New Mexican buffalo hunters sold his 1831 caravan dried meat and bread.³²

The trail also saw violence, and not from one side only. Gregg’s table notes three men killed in 1828, “being the first,” and a few more in later years.³ That fall two young traders, McNees and Monroe, were shot while asleep beside a creek on the way home. At the burial some of their companions fired on a small party of American Indians who came up, killing all but one, though Gregg thought them “not only innocent but ignorant” of the killing; in the raids that followed, the same company lost nearly a thousand mules and horses.²¹¹ The next spring the caravan had its first army escort, under Major Bennet Riley.²¹² In 1843 a band from the Missouri border, claiming to be Texan troops, robbed and killed the New Mexican trader Antonio José Chávez, and ten of them were tried at St. Louis; that same year Texans under Colonel Snively set out to seize Mexican traders’ goods until U.S. dragoons disarmed them near the Arkansas.³¹³¹⁴

Plain cotton cloth was “the great staple”.² Gregg put Mexico's tariff at about a hundred per cent of the goods’ cost in the United States, and when his wagons reached Santa Fe in July 1839 Governor Armijo had just begun charging $500 for every wagon, large or small, so traders turned to the largest wagons.²³ By his table the goods taken out each year grew from $15,000 in 1822 to $450,000 in 1843. Selling at double the cost was “excellent”, and net profits ran between twenty and forty per cent, though “not unfrequently” under ten.³

An original game in the journey-and-supplies tradition, built around trade rather than survival. The places, the two routes, the kinds of goods, the treaties and the shape of the trade come from the sources in the History section. The events on the road are the game's own inventions, built around what those sources describe, and no card quotes anyone. The trouble comes from weather, the land, and nameless outlaws and thieves; the meetings with the nations along the road are trade and talk. Nobody dies on screen: hands who fall sick, lose heart or lose their wages at cards leave the company, and that counts against you.

Many numbers are simplified for play. This is which are which.

Before release it was played 3,000 times at each level by an autopilot, with no crashes and no games left without a way forward. The autopilot comes home with a profit in about 81% of its Greenhorn ventures, 59% as a Trader and 30% as an Old hand.