The Santa Fe Trail split into two routes as it headed south from Westport, with campgrounds for trail travelers along the way: Sapling Grove northeast of the junction and a campground southwest called Flat Rock or Indian Creek. Until the 1860s, these two routes out of Westport carried Santa Fe traders, emigrants bound for Oregon and California, mountain men, missionaries, gold seekers, the frontier military, and even the frontier stagecoach of the early 1860s heading southwest. A party that left Kansas City on Friday, September 17, 1848, traveled with fifty-seven men and one woman, fourteen ox-drawn wagons, and one mule, and made its first camp at Indian Creek.
