The Santa Fe Trail began in 1821 when William Becknell led a small group of men on a trading expedition from frontier Missouri to colonial Santa Fe after Mexico declared its independence from Spain and ended years of trade restrictions. Santa Fe, starved for commodities, welcomed Becknell, and the route became an international trade road between two nations for more than fifty years, carrying great freight caravans as well as traders, trappers, mountain men, soldiers, gold seekers, and emigrants, with its most lasting legacy as a two-way trail of frontier commerce. In the Kansas City area, the Santa Fe Trail had two trailheads from the Missouri River at Westport and Independence; both routes met near present-day Gardner, Kansas, and continued southwest as one route. Congress designated the Santa Fe Trail a National Historic Trail in 1987. The Oregon Trail served hundreds of thousands of emigrants moving to the western frontiers from the late 1830s through the 1860s, helping lay claim to much of the West. First blazed by fur trappers and mountain men to and beyond the Rocky Mountains, it was being used by missionaries to the Indians in Oregon Territory by 1836. In 1841, the Bidwell-Barteleson party left the Oregon Trail in Idaho and became the first wagon train to California, and the overall route from Westport and Independence is now commonly called the Oregon-California Trail. By 1849, the gold rush to the Pacific shores crowded this trail, and stagecoaches also used it beginning in the 1850s. Its most lasting legacy became the image of wagon trains of families following the Oregon-California Trail to their destiny in the West. Through the Kansas City area, the Oregon-California Trail and the Santa Fe Trail shared the same routes until they split near present-day Gardner, Kansas.