Point of Rocks was a convenient camping place for travelers on the Santa Fe Trail in both directions. Westbound caravans knew they were two weeks from the end of their 900-mile journey, and from there they had their first view of the Rocky Mountains to the west while Wagon Mound, a notable landmark, came into sight. At Point of Rocks they could rest where water was always flowing and the pasture was good for their animals. At the beginning of the Mexican-American War in 1846, General Stephen Watts Kearny traveled over Raton Pass to Las Vegas, where he claimed New Mexico for the United States, but many of the volunteer units that followed him took the flatter Cimarron Route and passed by Point of Rocks. A doctor traveling with one group wrote of seeing a clear mountain stream coming out of the rock, which consisted of a mass of large blocks of sienite towering several hundred feet high. The arrival of the railroad in Las Vegas in 1879 ended the need for the Santa Fe Trail.