Fort Smith-Santa Fe Trail

Gregg's 1840 caravan left Santa Fe on February 25 with forty-seven men, twenty-eight wagons, two cannon, 200 mules and 300 sheep and goats. The Handbook of Texas says it fought off Pawnees in what is now Oldham County and lost most of the flock to a blue norther. Gregg later studied medicine, served as a correspondent in the Mexican War and collected plants for George Engelmann; twenty-three species carry the name greggi. In California he led the party that found Humboldt Bay, and he died there in 1850.

What the plaque says

Josiah Gregg (1806-50) blazed the Fort Smith-Santa Fe Trail in 1840 as a shorter route between the U.S. and New Mexico. He crossed this site on March 17, 1840, while returning to Arkansas from a trading expedition to Santa Fe and Chihuahua. In a book, "Commerce of the Prairies", published in 1844, Gregg recommended the new route, which paralleled the Canadian River. Over 2,000 California-bound gold seekers traveled it in 1849. The largest wagon train of that year was accompanied by U.S. Army troops commanded by Captain Randolph B. Marcy (1812-87), who made a survey of the trail for a proposed national wagon road. Marcy's party crossed this site on June 9, 1849. The extensive use of the Fort Smith-Santa Fe Trail in the early 1850s caused it to be considered as a favorable route for a transcontinental railroad. Lt. A. W. Whipple of the Army Corps of Engineer surveyed a possible route in the summer of 1853. By the late 1850s, emigrants were traveling a more southern road through El Paso, which was eventually to become the southern railroad route, and the Fort Smith-Santa Fe Trail fell into disuse and was finally abandoned. In many places on the Plains, the wagon ruts are still visible in the undisturbed prairie sod. (1974)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Hutchinson County Museum — 1.5 mi
  Borger's museum on the three-mile Main Street of a 1926 oil boom town that drew 45,000 people in ninety days and was put under martial law in 1929.
• Lake Meredith National Recreation Area — 10 mi
  A Canadian River reservoir in 200-foot breaks, built to water the Panhandle's cities, that fell to a record 26 feet deep in 2013 and still rises and falls with the drought.
• Alibates Flint Quarries National Monument — 18 mi
  Hand-dug pits on a mesa above the Canadian River where people quarried banded flint for thousands of years and traded it across the Plains, seen on a ranger-led climb.
• Carson County Square House Museum — 21 mi
  The 1880s ranch cottage that is the oldest house in the town of Panhandle, at the heart of a twenty-one-building museum of the plains from mammoth hunters to the oil boom.

More markers nearby

• Beale Road — steps away
• Site of John and Maggie Weatherly Half-Dugout Site — steps away
• First Methodist Church of Borger — 1.1 mi
• Grand Hotel and Grand Hardware Building — 1.5 mi