The Oregon Trail stretched from Missouri to the Pacific and served as the most important route for settlers traveling west, with as many as 1600 wagons a day passing over it. Its northwesternmost extension was the Cowlitz Trail, which led from the Columbia River to Puget Sound. The Village of Claquato stood on an adjunct of the Cowlitz Trail known as the Old Military Road, an important wagon road in southwest Washington. In 1852, Ezra Meeker, his wife Eliza, and their infant son traveled the Oregon Trail in a covered wagon pulled by oxen and eventually settled in Puyallup, Washington. In later years, fearing that the nation was forgetting the Oregon Trail and the thousands of pioneers who traveled it, Meeker in 1905, at age 75, took a wagon and a span of oxen back across the trail to honor its role in settling the American West. Along the route from Puyallup to Missouri, he asked 42 towns to erect stone monuments marking the trail’s location. Several towns did so during his original trip, while others waited ten years until the Daughters and Sons of the American Revolution provided funds. Of the 42 towns asked to install monuments, Claquato was one of three that did not fulfill its promise.