For generations Nebraska’s Platte Valley provided a natural east-west travel route for native peoples, fur traders, explorers, emigrants, and the military. The first known passage by white men along the Great Platte River Road in the Keith County vicinity was in 1813, when Robert Stuart and a party of fur hunters were returning east from Astoria on the Pacific Northwest Coast. In 1820 Major Stephen Long’s exploring party followed, ascending the Platte and South Platte to the Rocky Mountains. In 1830 fur trader William Sublette led the first wagon caravan along the Platte to the trappers’ rendezvous in Wyoming. His trek proved that wagons could cross the mountains, showing the way for thousands of overland emigrants to come in the 1840s and 1850s.