Five miles to the northeast, the Republican and Smoky Hill rivers unite to form the Kansas, or Kaw, and at that junction the city of Junction City was founded in 1857. Before the westward-building Union Pacific railroad arrived in 1866, steamboats occasionally navigated the Kaw River from Kansas City to Junction City when they could elude the shifting sandbars. Fort Riley, adjoining Junction City on the east, was established as Camp Center in 1852 and became one of the nation’s major military establishments, quartering some of the most famous U.S. Army units in history, including Custer’s Seventh cavalry, organized there in 1866. The army’s cavalry school, established at the post in 1892, was said to be the finest in the world until mechanization displaced the horse in the 1940s. Along Fort Riley’s southern edge are Marshall Field, an early army airport commanded in 1926 - 1928 by Major H. H. Arnold, later commanding general of the USAAF in World War Two, as well as farther north on the military reservation the Camp Funston area, a training center for both World Wars, the Fort Riley museum, and the First Capitol of Kansas, 1855.