A Religious Highway

This episode maps out the spiritual landscape of the Santa Fe Trail, exploring the fraught collision between Indigenous religious practices, Catholic missionization, and Anglo-American Protestantism in the Southwest. Forced assimilation and conversion efforts intensified the dispossession and dehumanization of Native peoples, as reflected in the federally sponsored reservation policy and the notorious system of Indian boarding schools.

Written and narrated by: Bobby Lee

Producer and engineer: Kyle Jackson

Theme Song: Fog Holler (used with permission)

Additional Musical Elements: Fog Holler, Casey James Holmberg, Kyle Jackson, Kate Bone

What is Wheels Across the West: History and Legacy of the Santa Fe Trail?

"Wheels Across the West: History and Legacy of the Santa Fe Trail" invites listeners on a fun and fact-filled adventure across time and territory to make sense of an oft-overlooked overland trail. Created, written, and narrated by students at the University of Missouri’s Kinder Institute on Constitutional Democracy, Wheels Across the West covers a wide range of topics that intersect with the past and present of the American West: mules, military forts, missionization, Hollywood Westerns, gun culture, living history reenactors, pioneer women, Black cowboys, and so much more. Transporting listeners from Indigenous pathways, to international wagon caravans, to railroads, highways, and modern-day Main Streets, this series reveals how the infrastructure and cultural landscape of the West has been constructed atop foundations laid long ago.