In the mid-19th century, many a young man in the state of Missouri yearned to make a trip to New Mexico over the Santa Fe Trail.

One of those was 17-year-old William Napton, whose father owned a plantation and also served in the Missouri Legislature. The overseer on the Napton estate in his youth had made two journeys across the southern plains as an ox drover.

From him, William heard tales of buffalo hunting and Indian fights. Charmed, as he said, by the prospect of adventure, he obtained his father’s permission to make his own excursion on the historic trail.

The merchant caravan the boy joined assembled at a campground outside Kansas City. The wagon master was Jim Chiles, only 25 years old, but experienced in the ways of the overland trade.

“On June 10, 1857,” Napton recalled long afterward, “we yoked up and started the long journey.” Forty-seven years later, he recounted his memories of that venture in a slim, self-published booklet, Over the Santa Fe Trail, 1857. His 1905 publication is now a rare and pricey item on the antiquarian book market.

In it, the author gives us candid sketches of people and events drawn from his summer on the trail. From its pages, we catch an authentic sense of what it was like to accompany the slow-moving freight wagons loaded with merchandise for the New Mexico trade.

“A man six feet tall could stand erect in one of them,” Napton remarked, “and each wagon was designed to carry seven to eight thousand pounds of goods.”

He added, “Two of our wagons were loaded with champagne for Col. Ceran St. Vrain of Las Vegas and Mora, N.M.” St. Vrain had earlier been the business partner of Charles Bent, first American governor of the territory until his assassination at Taos in 1847.

Young Napton includes some dramatic details of his bringing down buffalo when the first herds were encountered on the central Kansas prairies.

Even at 17, he was a natural-born hunter and relates: “All told, I killed about 20 buffalo on the journey out and back. A steak, cut from the loin of a buffalo cow, broiled on the coals with a thin slice of bacon attached to it to improve the flavor, was ‘good eating.’ ”

In western Kansas near the Cimarron River, a moving village of Comanches and another of Kiowas, then allies, suddenly appeared. For a couple of days, they followed the wagon train at a small distance, their young men on horseback annoying the white men and their livestock.

At last, Chiles, who knew Indian ways, summoned the chiefs from both tribes to an evening powwow. They came and sat in a dignified circle smoking their pipes.

Chiles told the Indians that if they stopped bothering his caravan and left, he would give them what food could be spared from the mess wagon.

The chiefs readily agreed. So, promptly they were given several pack mules loaded with sacks of flour and sugar, plus sides of bacon.

Commented Napton: “I thought the Indians regarded the things we gave them, as a sort of tribute we were obliged to pay for the privilege of passing through their country unmolested.” It worked, for the wayfarers experienced no further trouble.

The trip ended, not in Santa Fe, but at Las Vegas, N.M., where all the goods were consigned to local merchants. After a single day of rest, Chiles ordered his drovers to crack their whips and start the long trail back to Missouri.

In camp after the first day homeward bound, a New Mexican boy about 16 appeared and asked permission to go with the wagons to the States. “He was a bright and active lad, able to understand and speak English,” wrote Napton.

After the wagonmaster told him he was welcome to tag along, the boy admitted he was a peon fleeing from his master. Since the practice of debt peonage was then protected under territorial law, the runaway was a fugitive from justice.

He was hidden by the sympathetic drovers in one of the wagons. But later, two law officers galloped up carrying pistols and a writ for arrest of the culprit. They soon found him hidden under bedding and dragged him protesting and crying to one of the horses.

The trainmen, according to Napton, were much distressed but could do nothing. “The little fellow was carried back to his condition of slavery or peonage as it was called by the officers.”

At home in Missouri, William Napton once more enjoyed the bounty of his father’s dinner table. But he could not repress the memory of the youngster, only one year his junior, who had been seized and carried back into peonage.

Historian Marc Simmons is author of numerous books on New Mexico and the Southwest. His column appears Saturdays.