Samuel Bowman Watrous, born in Vermont three years before the War of 1812, traveled to the Mexican Province of Nuevo M xico in 1835 by wagon train along the Santa Fe Trail and ran a store for miners during a period of gold fever south of Santa Fe. He and his family homesteaded on the eastern plains in 1849, and saw the opening of New Mexico to the rest of the United States as the railroad replaced the wagon train as a means of transport. His was...