Santa Fe National Historic Trail NPGallery Digital Archive
This digital archive features photos along the Santa Fe National Historic Trail.
The Santa Fe Trail was primarily a commercial highway connecting Missouri and Santa Fe, New Mexico.
Missouri trader William Becknell pioneered the route in 1821 when he left Franklin, Missouri in September and headed over the plains to Santa Fe.
Mexico had recently achieved its independence from Spain, and the new Mexican government – unlike its colonial predecessor – welcomed outside trade.
For nearly three decades the Santa Fe Trail grew in international significance as a two-way commercial highway used by both Mexican and American traders.
When the two nations went to war in 1846, the trail quickly became a military route for U.S. invading armies.
When the war ended two years later, the route settled into the primary connection between the eastern U.S and its new territories in the southwest.
The rapid expansion of the railroad network in the U.S during and after the Civil War foretold the end of the Santa Fe Trail.
When the frst locomotive reached Santa Fe in 1880, trail use, which was already greatly diminished, virtually ceased.
Today, the national historic trail extends 1,203 miles across Missouri, Kansas, Oklahoma, Colorado, and New Mexico.
The Santa Fe National Historic Trail was established by Congress in 1987 and is administered by the National Trails Office.
About NPGallery
The NPGallery Digital Asset Management System is an enterprise system for storing,
organizing, and sharing photos and other digital files. NPGallery's central online repository offers
a place for the NPS to store digital assets, including photos, illustrations, audio files, videos,
and documents. The NPGallery platform lets parks and other programs easily store and organize all
of their digital files, and allows users access to easily find and retrieve specific files.
NPGallery is a premier solution for NPS parks and programs who have a need to manage and disseminate
large volumes of digital assets, with many people accessing and using those assets.
NPGallery supports a wide array of digital asset file types (images, MS office formats, adobe pdfs, audio files, videos).
Digital assets have control access to those files to ensure they are used properly.
NPGallery supports parks and programs with
digital asset hosting and delivery services.
Digital assets in the system can be provided for
public use, or locked for discovery only by internal NPS users.
NPGallery has terabytes of digital files of all types that are safely stored and quickly
retrievable for NPS business needs.
NPGallery provides a simple text search and search by state and park options,
or has the ability to “search more fields” for robust metadata searching.
Search results can be refined by filtering options.
NPGallery supports web services, support for embedded metadata, and integrated geospatial capabilities.
NPGallery also has a responsive user interface design, and the interface will gracefully
resize to match the size of the screen on your device, supporting mobile.
Web authors using the NPS.gov content management system(CMS) now use NPGallery as the
source for all photo galleries shown in the CMS.
Benefits of NPGallery to Parks & Programs
The NPGallery platform lets parks and other programs easily store and organize all of their digital files,
and allows users access to easily find and retrieve specific files.
These images and other digital assets have a direct URL link and can be used on program web pages.
Multiple file sizes of each digital asset are stored and available for use and download.
Contact the NPGallery staff to have us assist your park or program with your unique Digital Asset Management needs.
Email: NPGallery@nps.gov
NPGallery has continued working with individual parks and programs to create individual portals.
These semi-custom web pages allow NPS parks and programs to deliver digital assets from a
unique web page that highlights and shares photos, documents, audio files, and videos.
Searching the featured digital archive can be customized to help guide a user through discovering
the valuable digital assets unique to each park or program.