Pedro Vial, Trail Blazer

By "The Cowboy" Jim Gray
THE WAY WEST

Pedro Vial wandered the plains long before well-known famous explorers made their reputations from the endless sea of grass. Vial was born in Lyons, France, in the approximate year of 1747. Little is known of his earliest years in North America. By the 1770s he had traversed the Missouri River, trapping and interacting with the native tribes that lived there.

His reputation reached all the way to Texas where in 1786 he was commissioned by Texas Gov. Domingo Cebello to blaze a trail from San Antonio to Santa Fe, N.M.

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