by Bob Luder, photos by Steven Hertzog
DOUGLAS COUNTY’S FAMED SANTA FE & OREGON TRAILS WERE ONCE DOTTED WITH TOWNS THAT WERE SIGNIFICANT YET FLEETING DURING HISTORIC TIMES IN THE UNITED STATES. If St. Louis, with its iconic arch, is forever known in folklore as “The Gateway to the West,” then Kansas, specifically northeast Kansas and more specifically Douglas County, certainly can lay claim to being a “Roadway to the West” for settlers, traders and gold-seekers crossing the everexpanding country in the 19th century. Two of the great migratory pathways west of that time—the Santa Fe Trail and Oregon Trail—cross Douglas County from side to side, east to west, west to east. These two “national highways,” before highways existed, actually met just to the south and east of the county near what is today Gardner before splitting westward. The Oregon Trail, first traveled by a party of settlers led by William Sublette in 1830, veered diagonally northwest, crossing just east of Eudora and heading up near Lecompton. The Santa Fe Trail, first traversed by Coronado and Spanish explorers in the 1500s but first traveled on by American explorers in 1821 and surveyed in 1825 by the federal 46
government, meandered slightly northwest toward Baldwin City before turning southwest toward its ultimate destination in New Mexico. The topography of the Kansas plains was open, flatter and more conducive for wagon train travel, and the climate was wet enough, the foliage lush enough, to provide needed water and food for cattle, mules and oxen that drove the wagons. The trails differed in that the Santa Fe Trail eventually became more a transportation route of commerce and exchanging goods. Traders of all things— crops, furs, pelts and leather goods—moved both westward and eastward throughout most of the year, while the Oregon Trail served mainly as a migratory route for settlers looking to stake claims to free land in Oregon, or explorers searching for gold during the California Gold Rush. Movement on the Oregon Trail was nearly completely westward. The trails became increasingly busy with travelers in the mid-1800s, and as a result, communities began popping up, either as a result of migrants choosing to settle there
