Gateway to the West, The Overland Trails Begin Here

Independence, Missouri, in the eighteen forties was a town that smelled of livestock and leather, of cured hides and wood smoke, and underneath it all the particular tang of the Missouri River at high water. It was also, for a generation of Americans, the last town they knew. Wagons rolled west out of Independence, out of Saint Joseph, out of Council Grove, the jumping-off places for three of the greatest mass migrations in the history of the continent.

The Santa Fe Trail opened first, in eighteen twenty-one, the year Missouri became a state. William Becknell, a Missouri trader, led the first commercial caravan from the Missouri River to Santa Fe in the newly independent republic of Mexico, a journey of roughly nine hundred miles. Within a decade the trail was a thriving commercial corridor carrying American manufactured goods southwest and returning with silver and furs.

It remained in active use for nearly sixty years. The Oregon Trail began taking shape in the early eighteen forties. The Bidwell-Bartleson Party, departing from near Independence in May of eighteen forty-one, was among the first wagon trains to attempt the full overland route to the Pacific coast.

Over the following two decades an estimated three hundred thousand people made the journey, families bound for the Willamette Valley, miners heading for California gold after eighteen forty-nine, religious communities seeking refuge in Utah. The trails diverged at Fort Laramie and beyond, but they all began in Missouri, in the churned mud of the starting camps along the river. The California Trail split from the Oregon route near what is now Idaho, bending south toward the Sierra Nevada.

Together these routes amounted to the largest voluntary land migration in American history, and Missouri was where it left the ground.