Wagons bound for Oregon and California left Independence beginning in the 1840s and developed a trail to this location, while others started across the prairie from St. Joseph and Fort Leavenworth. Traffic merged here at the junction of the Independence and St. Joe Roads, and from this point the shared route headed northwesterly across Nebraska along the Platte River corridor until the routes split again in western Wyoming. In the 1860s, the Pony Express and the Overland Stage also followed this route. Westward from here, the tallgrass prairie began changing to shortgrass plains, and as emigrants approached the Platte, they wrote in their journals of seeing buffalo and antelope for the first time. Water and trees became scarcer, and emigrants began collecting buffalo chips to fuel their campfires.