“If you traveled to the Missouri River in the golden days of the Santa Fe Trail you found yourself at last on the far brink of civilization. Behind you were settlements still raw from the hands of the builders; prairies still steaming from the first spring touch of the plow; then lines of rails, leaping westward, bearing wood-burning locomotives with great smokestacks shaped like inverted cones; then villages where bells swung to and fro on quiet Sundays mornings and people plodded to church along streets lined with ancient elms; then factories and mills, rising with the muddy torrents of the industrial area; then cities where traffic jammed in the streets and theaters dazzled the eye at night.

But in front of you, you knew, were opportunity and romance. When you jumped off from the west bank of the Missouri into the plains country you said goodbye to the best and worst civilization and entered a region in which the life lived and the people who lived it did not belong at all in the Nineteenth Century or the Occidental world. 

The wilderness was laid out on a scale that dazed and delighted those used to the pocket landscapes of New England. You passed from the lush prairies to the shortgrass county, from that to burning deserts. You came upon milky rivers half sunken in their shining sands. You saw mountains glistening like polished silver in the remote distances, or hanging like faint clouds above the horizon.” 

– R.L. Duffus from The Santa Fe Trail (1930)