Authorized by an 1838 act of the Congress of the Republic of Texas, Col. W.G. Cooke and the Texas First Infantry Regiment laid out a military road in 1840 from Austin north through what became Dallas to the Holland Coffee Trading Post on Red River, later covered by Lake Texoma. Coffee developed the town of Preston near the trading post, and Cooke's route became known as Preston Road between the Red River and Dallas. Immigrants from Missouri and Arkansas traveled through Indian Territory, now Oklahoma, into Texas along Preston Road, and in one six-week period in 1845 roughly 1,000 wagons crossed the river into Texas. From the mid-1850s the road became the route for Texas' first cattle drive, and later, as the Shawnee Trail, it probably took its name from a Native American village called Shawneetown north of what became Denison. Cattle swam the Red River at Rock Bluff Crossing, where a natural rock formation served as a chute into the water, later the site of the city of Sherman's water intake station on Lake Texoma. It remained the principal route north for Texas cattle until the Civil War, with the last large herds moving through Grayson County in 1871. Parts of the old route remain visible at Rocky Point on Lake Texoma and along Hanna Drive, and its overall course is followed by parts of Preston Road in Grayson County, a Farm-to-Market road and State Highway Route 289, and Preston Road in Dallas.