The Santa Fe, Oregon, and California trails were both challenging and exhilarating for travelers in caravans passing through this junction along one of the Westport routes. Letters and diaries recorded adventures and excitement as well as hardship and loss. Mormon John Davies, traveling through this trail junction with a wagon train of Oregon and California emigrants on July 1, 1854, wrote that at Indian Creek his wife gave birth to a daughter between 12 and 1 a.m. and that by 8 o'clock they rolled out again. Heading west on the Santa Fe Trail after leaving Sapling Grove in 1839, Dr. F. A. Wislizenus wrote of marching over the broad Santa Fe road beaten out by caravans. Traveling the northern route from Westport in 1842, Richard L. Wilson wrote that after reaching Westport, a little trafficking village in the twilight of better times, they were at once adrift beyond the pale of society, a law unto themselves, after a day's ride through plains fragrant with the freshest imprint of the opening year. An old-time trader recalled jumping from water hole to water hole across Kansas on the old Santa Fe Trail. Traveling the southern route from Westport in 1857, William B. Napton wrote that the work cattle and wagons were collected and a camp established about the first of May on the high rolling prairie near the Santa Fe Trail, three miles southwest of Westport, awaiting the arrival of freight at Kansas City; there were twenty-six wagons, five yokes of oxen to each, carrying about seven thousand pounds of freight each, and at the outset everybody about the train was filled with good humor as perfect weather and the apparently boundless prairie exhilarated them.
