Lucky Lindy wanted to open Santa Feans' eyes to the promise of air travel but instead left them gasping for breath.

As he made his approach over La Bajada that September day in 1927, Charles Lindbergh, flying his famous Spirit of St. Louis, "spied a row of autos buzzing along the road, swooped down to a few feet above the ground and crow-hopped over one after the other," a news report said.

"(He) shot like an arrow over to the landing field, a tumbleweed dangling from his tail skid."

Lindbergh, only four months from his historic nonstop flight across the Atlantic, was headed for Santa Fe as part of his nationwide flyover to promote air travel and commerce.

After landing on an airstrip south of where present-day St. Michael's Drive meets Cerrillos Road, Lindbergh went to the statehouse to give a speech.

Thousands cheered as Lindbergh climbed the steps to declare that air travel was the future and that Santa Fe would have the same opportunities for air development as any other city, thanks to new aircraft engines that could conquer the city's high altitude.

Santa Feans forged an instant connection with Lindbergh. For generations, after all, their pioneer spirit had blazed many a trail.

The story of Santa Fe, which this year celebrates its 400 years of history, has always been linked to one trail or another. Native, Spanish and American settlers followed dusty paths to open space, water and wildlife at the foot of the Sangre de Cristos. Traders, often following the vestiges of centuries-old pathways, carved out wider and more well-defined trails for their wagons. Eventually, the railroads, the highways and the airplanes all raced through town.

Santa Fe's story always has been about newcomers who came and went and natives who often resisted, feeling as though their long-established communities and traditions were constantly under siege.

"Everybody who came here was an outsider totally convinced that the people here were subhuman and that the land was free," said Bob Haozous, a prominent Chiricahua Apache artist and son of the late Allan Houser, the famous sculptor.

Adventurers meet pioneers

Lindbergh was the most famous flier to visit Santa Fe but not the first. Nine years before Lindbergh, a mail plane had landed on an airstrip that a gang of prison inmates hastily scratched into the dirt.

Townspeople rushed to the edge of town to see, partly because they had something in common with the aviators. Like the young pilots, the folks of 1927 Santa Fe knew about adventure.

They came from the men and women who rode El Camino Real and the Santa Fe Trail.

From its beginning, Santa Fe was a destination. In the late-1500s, Juan de Oñate led a 4-mile-long caravan of soldiers, settlers and livestock on a grueling 1,700-mile journey on El Camino Real from Mexico City to New Mexico.

"The day-to-day dangers encountered were the unknown perils posed by the terrain, the weather and potentially hostile Indians," read a vivid account published in the fall 2005 La Herencia by New Mexico Highlands historian Maurilio Vigil.

"The greatest fear, however, was of starvation and the scarcity of water."

As the main link between the Spanish provinces to the south with New Mexico, the trail became the pathway for much of what would compose the tapestry of the New Mexico territory.

"It was the route along which all the elements of culture, everything from music to furniture making to religious practices, were brought into New Mexico," said historian Tom Merlan of Santa Fe. "If you are Hispanic and you live in New Mexico, then one or more of your forebears came up or used the Camino Real."

Starting in 1821, Santa Fe's door opened to the east via 1,200 miles of plains, desert and mountains called the Santa Fe Trail. Wagon trains heading north and west met in Santa Fe to sell silver, furs and other natural resources or swap them for tools, weapons and manufactured goods from the east.

John Barker gets what motivated the Santa Fe Trail pioneers. Barker, whose family today runs the Old Santa Fe Inn, is the great-great-grandson of one of those pioneers, N.B. Laughlin.

"He had been a Confederate soldier," Barker said. "And if you had fought for the South, the only thing to do was head west."

The trail carried more traders than settlers, but Laughlin, who eventually rose to a seat on the territorial Supreme Court, represented the disenfranchised travelers looking for a new start.

"It was always about making money, and everybody made a lot of money both ways," Barker said.

Railroads changed game

Rails replaced the trails in 1880s, because trains were faster, more comfortable and in the long run cheaper than wagon trains.

Railroads, competing for the lucrative markets and settlement opportunities, were in fierce competition with each other, and as quickly as one went under or merged with a competitor, another would spring up.

Fred Friedman, longtime head of the rail division of the Department of Transportation, figures that nearly 145 rail lines have operated in New Mexico at one time or another. From 1880 to the present, five rail lines have served Santa Fe County alone.

They left tracks, literally and figuratively, Friedman said, "in the form of tracks and depots, built-up alignments, and a confusing paper trail of mergers, leases, sales, purchases, abandonments, bankruptcies and acquisitions."

The companies often stuck local communities with worthless bonds and other public debts spent on construction and expansion of rail lines.

The anti-donation clause of the state Constitution stands today to shield taxpayers from the bungling, corruption and greed of the railroad era. The law prohibiting use of state money to build rail lines has modern-day implications.

The anti-donation clause, which bars state appropriations from going to private interests, remains a contentious political issue today as the state, counties and cities wrestle with intermodal transportation financing, Friedman said.

Open road opened worlds

The automobile gave the freedom of travel and relocation to the masses. Once again, Santa Fe would watch people come and go.

When highway engineers in 1926 first laid out U.S. Route 66, it passed through Santa Fe, encouraging motels, restaurants and other travel-related businesses along the way.

"For the Route 66 traveler coming from back east it was as if they had entered another country," says one description of the highway.

"The fascinating Native American and Spanish cultures encountered along New Mexico Route 66 opened up new worlds never dreamed of by (the motorists)."

Wide-eyed travelers gave Route 66 its purpose. Political shenanigans took it all away. After 12 years, in 1938, Route 66 was rerouted to sidestep Santa Fe.

The state's governor, Arthur Hannett, stinging from a re-election defeat, saw to it that a new stretch of the highway directly connected Santa Rosa to Albuquerque, according to The Road Wanderer Web site. The new road that bypassed Santa Fe also saved drivers almost four hours.

The hard climb to 7,000 feet had convinced the railroads to bypass Santa Fe and helped Albuquerque boom. Airlines made the same choice.

Lindbergh's vision now

The promise of air travel never matched the grand vision Lindbergh outlined 83 years ago on the statehouse steps, but an increase in commercial flights has been one of the biggest business stories in Santa Fe in recent years.

On Feb. 11, American Eagle is set to add a third daily flight to Dallas. The regional airline initiated a daily flight to Los Angeles in November.

Santa Fe travelers take 240,000 to 250,000 commercial flights each year, statistics show. Jim Montman, director of the Santa Fe Municipal Airport, said he expects no more than 30 percent of those flights in the future to originate in Santa Fe. The rest will fly out of the regional airport in Albuquerque.

The current local airport, established by the military in 1941 and at roughly its present size since the 1950s, is the latest of four defined airfields in Santa Fe.

Historically, mergers and business failures cursed the airlines, as they did the railroads of an earlier era. Continental, Pioneer, Texas International, Zia Airlines, Mountain Air, Trans-America and Air Midwest — one by one, they left Santa Fe, citing the companies' financial woes, poor runway conditions and lack of sustained support from the city.

Carry on, but how?

Transportation is a hot topic again, because of the Rail Runner Express, which in December 2008 connected Santa Fe and Albuquerque by commuter rail. Matters of coming and going and memories of boom and bust are on the public agenda in a new way.

Planners are looking once and for all for a sustainable regional transportation system.

In August 2008, the state Department of Transportation and the New Mexico Association of Regional Councils convened a statewide meeting. Good transportation systems strengthen the economy and improve quality of life, the people in attendance quickly agreed.

But how do communities maintain safe roads and bikeways, control congestion, minimize pollution, promote fuel conservation, provide mobility for disabled people and senior citizens, and make it all affordable for taxpayers?

In the next 20 years, the study produced from the meeting concluded, New Mexico will need $22 billion in highways, bridges and interchanges but will have just $5 billion to spend. Public funding has not kept pace with the cost of transportation projects, and that explained the funding gap.

To fight that trend, the report recommended that:

• Transportation and community planners get people involved to help draft an integrated, public-spirited vision for good roads, rails and runways.

• State and local governments coordinate efforts to make projects efficient and affordable.

• The state spend transportation revenue only on transportation, adjust revenue for inflation and create a permanent trust fund.

Brothers at end of trail

While officials look toward a sustainable transportation future built on the shoulders of the past, native artist Bob Haozous is urging celebrants of Santa Fe's 400th anniversary to remember the past but not to distort it with revisionist history.

Haozous, 67, whose maternal ancestors passed through the hands of Abiquiú slave traders, says the anniversary should be more a time of accurate historical education, rather than glorification of economic, commercial invasions that dispossessed indigenous people.

"They came and took away our religion, took away our language, took away our laws and our philosophical concepts," Haozous said.

He hopes that Santa Fe 400th celebrants, while honoring exploration and trade that led to prosperity, will also mourn the murders and hangings of Native Americans on the Plaza.

Now, Haozous said, Santa Feans — descendants of the Spanish, the genetic mix of Anglo Americans and the people already here hundreds of years before the Camino Real, Santa Fe Trail or Lindbergh's airplane — are a blended people.

"There's an old (Spanish) guy up on Upper Canyon Road whom I sit and talk with," Haozous said. "He says we have all been here 400 years together, that we are all brothers."

Dennis J. Carroll can be reached at 505-986-3091.