By the early 19th cent. small trapping parties had reached Santa Fe, then under Spanish rule; but they were forbidden to trade. In Nov., 1821, William Becknell, a trader, returned with news that Mexico was free and Santa Fe welcomed trade. Early in 1822 he left Missouri for Santa Fe with the first party of traders. From then on, annual wagon caravans, usually leaving in early summer, made the 40- to 60-day trip over the trail and returned after a 4- to 5-week stay in Santa Fe. An increasing amount of goods was taken to Santa Fe each year. In 1850 a monthly stage line was started between Independence and Santa Fe over the northern route. In 1880 the Santa Fe RR reached Santa Fe, marking the death of the trail.

Founded c.1609 by the Spanish on the site of prehistoric Native American ruins, it became a center of Spanish trade with local ethnic groups. A seat of government since its founding, it is the oldest capital city in the United States. In the Pueblo revolt of 1680, the Spanish colonists were driven out; in 1692 they returned under Diego de Vargas. Shortly after Mexico gained independence from Spain (1821), extensive commerce with the United States developed by way of the Santa Fe Trail. In 1846, the region became a U.S. territory. The railroad reached Lamy (the station for Santa Fe, 16 mi/26 km distant) in 1879.

The seat of an archbishopric since 1875, the city, with its many churches, is a Roman Catholic center. Points of interest are the Palace of the Governors (c.1610), which houses a state museum; the Laboratory of Anthropology, with a museum of Spanish colonial art; museums of international folk art, Navajo ceremonial art, and contemporary Native American art; an exhibition hall for contemporary art; and a museum devoted to the artist Georgia O'Keeffe. There are artists' and writers' colonies and many art galleries, a renowned summer opera, the restored Lensic Theater, St. John's College, the College of Santa Fe, a Native American school, and a state school for the deaf. The city is the headquarters for the Santa Fe National Forest and regional headquarters for the National Park Service.

Historic wagon trail from Independence, Missouri, to Santa Fe, New Mexico, U.S. An important commercial route from 1821 to 1880, it was opened by William Becknell and used by merchant wagon caravans. From the Missouri River the trail followed the divide between the tributaries of the Arkansas and Kansas rivers to the site of modern Great Bend, Kan., then proceeded along the Arkansas River. At the western end three routes turned south to Santa Fe, the shortest being the Cimarron Cutoff through the valley of the Cimarron River. When the Santa Fe railroad was completed in 1880, use of the trail ceased.

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City (pop., 2000: 62,203), capital of New Mexico, U.S. It lies at the foot of the Sangre de Cristo Mountains. Founded by the Spanish in 1610, it was the administrative, military, and missionary headquarters of a vast, sparsely populated Spanish colonial province during the 18th century. In the Mexican War in 1846, the city was occupied by U.S. forces under Gen. Stephen Kearny. After New Mexico was ceded to the U.S., Santa Fe became the capital of the territory in 1851. In 1912 it became the state capital. It was the western terminus of the Santa Fe Trail. It is a major tourist centre noted for Indian and Mexican handicrafts, and its large Spanish-American population has made it the cultural capital of the southwest. A popular summer resort, it also attracts winter skiers.

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One of the two forms in which iron is obtained by smelting. Wrought iron is a soft, easily worked, fibrous metal. It usually contains less than 0.1percnt carbon and 1–2percnt slag. It is superior for most purposes to cast iron, which is hard and brittle because of its higher carbon content. In antiquity, iron was smelted directly by heating ore in a forge with charcoal, which served both as fuel and reducing agent. While still hot, the iron-and-slag mixture was removed as a lump and worked (wrought) with a hammer to expel most of the slag and weld the iron into a coherent mass. Wrought iron began to take the place of bronze (being far more available) in Asia Minor in the 2nd millennium BC; its use for tools and weapons was established in China, India, and the Mediterranean by the 3rd century BC. Later, in Europe, wrought iron was produced indirectly from cast iron (see puddling process). With the invention of the Bessemer process and open-hearth process, steel supplanted wrought iron for structural purposes, and its use in the 20th century has been principally decorative.

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Most common type of anemia, which may develop in times of high iron loss and depletion of iron stores (e.g., rapid growth, pregnancy, menstruation) or in settings of low dietary iron intake or inefficient iron uptake (e.g., starvation, intestinal parasites, gastrectomy). Much of the world's population is iron-deficient to some degree. Symptoms include low energy level and sometimes paleness, shortness of breath, cold extremities, sore tongue, or dry skin. In advanced cases, red blood cells are small, pale, and low in hemoglobin, blood iron levels are reduced, and body iron stores are depleted. Treatment with iron usually brings quick improvement.

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Metallic chemical element, one of the transition elements, chemical symbol Fe, atomic number 26. Iron is the most used and cheapest metal, the second most abundant metal and fourth most abundant element in Earth's crust. It occurs rarely as a free metal, occasionally in natural alloys (especially in meteorites), and in hundreds of minerals and ores, including hematite, magnetite, limonite, and siderite. The human body contains about one-sixth of an ounce (4.5 g) of iron, mostly in hemoglobin and its precursors; iron in the diet is essential to health. Iron is ferromagnetic (see ferromagnetism) at ordinary temperatures and is the only metal that can be tempered (see tempering). Its uses in steels of various types, as well as in cast and wrought iron (collectively, “ferrous metals”), are numerous. Alteration of its properties by impurities, especially carbon, is the basis of steelmaking. Iron in compounds usually has valence 2 (ferrous) or 3 (ferric). Ferrous and ferric oxides (FeO and Fe₂O₃, respectively) are used as pigments and the latter as jewelers' rouge. Rust is ferric oxide containing water; ferric oxide is widely used as a magnetic recording material in computer data-storage devices and magnetic tapes. Ferrous and ferric sulfates and chlorides are all of industrial importance as mordants, reducing agents, flocculating agents, or raw materials and in inks and fertilizers.

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Alloy of iron that contains 2–4percnt carbon, along with silicon, manganese, and impurities. It is made by reducing iron ore in a blast furnace (cast iron is chemically the same as blast-furnace iron) and casting the liquid iron into ingots called pigs. Pig iron is remelted, along with scrap and alloying elements, in cupola furnaces and recast into molds for a variety of products. In the 18th–19th centuries, cast iron was a cheaper engineering material than wrought iron (not requiring intensive refining and hammering). It is more brittle and lacks tensile strength. Its compressive (load-bearing) strength made it the first important structural metal. In the 20th century, steel replaced it as a construction material, but cast iron still has industrial applications in automobile engine blocks, agricultural and machine parts, pipes, hollowware, stoves, and furnaces. Most cast iron is either so-called gray iron or white iron, the colours shown by fracture; gray iron contains more silicon and is less hard and more machinable than white iron. Both are brittle, but malleable cast iron (produced by prolonged heat-treating), first made in 18th-century France, was developed into an industrial product in the U.S. Cast iron that is ductile as cast was invented in 1948. The latter now constitutes a major family of metals, widely used for gears, dies, automobile crankshafts, and many other machine parts.

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Final technological and cultural stage in the Stone–Bronze–Iron-Age sequence (or Three-Age System) in which iron largely replaced bronze in implements and weapons. The start of the Iron Age varied geographically, beginning in the Middle East and southeastern Europe circa 1200 BC but in China not until circa 600 BC. Though the large-scale production of iron implements brought new patterns of more permanent settlement, use of iron for weapons put arms in the hands of the masses for the first time and set off a series of large-scale movements and conquests that did not end for 2,000 years and that changed the face of Europe and Asia. Seealso Bronze Age.

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(born 1325/26, Shīrāz, Iran—died 1389/90, Shīrāz) Persian poet. The recipient of a traditional religious education (hsubdotāfizsubdot designates someone who has learned the Qurhamzahān by heart), he served as court poet to several rulers of Shīrāz. He perfected the ghazel as a verse form of 6–15 couplets linked by unity of subject and symbolism rather than by a logical sequence of ideas. His poems are notable for their simple, often colloquial, musical language and his unaffected use of homely images and proverbial expressions. His most famous work is his Dīvān. He is regarded as one of the greatest Persian lyric poets.

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