Wagon Bed Spring in southwestern Kansas was one of the most important watering places on the Cimarron Cutoff of the Santa Fe Trail, where dependable water was scarce between the Arkansas and Cimarron watersheds. For roughly six decades, emigrant and military parties regularly camped there, drawing water from an outcrop of the Ogallala Formation. The site is also associated with the probable death of mountain man Jedediah Smith nearby on May 27, 1831. Flooding beginning in 1914 shifted the Cimarron River so the spring site now lies in the river bed, and irrigation lowered the water table until the spring stopped flowing in the 1960s.