The historic junction of the Santa Fe Trail, the Oregon Trail, and the California Trail lay about one-half mile north of here, with the Santa Fe Trail to the southwest and the road to Oregon and California to the northwest. By 1827, freight wagons loaded with goods and commodities were traveling between the Missouri River frontier and Mexico’s provincial capital at Santa Fe. That year, returning from a 1,500 mile journey to the northern Rocky Mountains, fur trappers William Sublette and Moses "Black" Harris came down the Kansas River Valley, encountered the Santa Fe Trail near here, and followed it east to the settlements at Independence and St. Louis. That single event fixed the location of this historic junction and foreshadowed the creation of the Oregon and California trails. Between the late 1830s and the early 1850s, as many as 200,000 emigrants may have passed through this gateway to begin new lives in the Oregon Territory or seek fortune in the gold fields of California, while thousands of freighters also traveled through the junction to and from the markets at Santa Fe. When William Sublette turned south from the Kansas River toward the path of the Santa Fe Trail, he created a landmark as well as an emigrant path to the west.