Westport Landing and the Trail That Built the Town
Near Kansas City, Missouri
In the eighteen thirties, a man named John Calvin McCoy established a trading post on a bluff four miles south of the Missouri River landing that would become Kansas City. He called the settlement Westport, and he correctly understood its value: it sat at the edge of the unorganized territory beyond which the trails west began. People heading for Santa Fe, for Oregon, for California would need to be outfitted before they left the United States behind. Westport was the last American town on the road to three different frontiers.
The Santa Fe Trail had been in use since eighteen twenty-one, when William Becknell first opened the commercial route from Missouri to the Spanish and then Mexican city of Santa Fe, roughly nine hundred miles southwest. The Oregon Trail opened in the early eighteen forties, carrying settlers north and west toward the Columbia River country. The California Trail branched off toward Sacramento after gold was discovered at Sutter's Mill in January of eighteen forty-eight. Within a year, the Gold Rush was moving tens of thousands of people through the Missouri River crossings, most of them through Westport Landing.
What Westport sold was everything. Wagons and oxen and mules. Flour and bacon and salt. Rope and canvas and harness leather. Rifles and shot and powder. A wagon and the supplies to fill it cost a sum that took most farming families years to accumulate, and they spent it in a week in Westport, loading their goods and crossing the river to the jumping-off point on the Kansas side. The merchants of Westport, men like McCoy and Alexander Majors who would later build the Pony Express, became wealthy on the traffic.
The settlement on the river landing, originally called the Town of Kansas, incorporated as Kansas City, Missouri in eighteen fifty-three. Westport was eventually annexed into it in eighteen ninety seven. The building that once housed McCoy's store still stands on Westport Road, the oldest building in Kansas City. The street it sits on retains the name of the trail that built the town.
