Gum Springs, located at what is now 59th Terrace and Bluejacket in Shawnee, was the site of the Shawnee Indian church and meeting house and of several excellent springs near the intersection of the Fort Leavenworth Military Road and the California Road and at the beginning of the cutoff road to the Santa Fe, Oregon, and California trails. It served as a campsite for travelers on all of these routes, especially for frontier military forces during the Mexican War of 1846-1848. After the Kansas-Nebraska Act opened the territory to settlement in 1854, the small town that grew up around the old campsite was known as Gum Springs and became the first county seat until Olathe replaced it in 1857. On June 23, 1847, Private E.N.O. Clough, traveling on the Fort Leavenworth Military Road after leaving Fort Leavenworth, crossed the Kaw River, camped four miles from the crossing, and wrote that he found a beautiful gum spring beside the Shawnee church, about six miles from Westport, where the place was known as Gum Spring among the people. He then continued to the junction with the Santa Fe Trail and west in the Mexican War. Today, a small remnant of the Shawnee Indian graveyard and a small spring pond to the northeast are the only physical reminders of this important past.