Fort Smith-Santa Fe Trail, Gregg Route, 1840

After this crossing Gregg never again went west by the plains. He studied medicine at the University of Louisville in 1845, then joined General John E. Wool's Arkansas Volunteers in the Mexican War as interpreter and correspondent, writing an eyewitness account of Buena Vista. He practiced medicine in Saltillo and collected plants in western Mexico and California for George Engelmann, and twenty-three species bear the name greggi. In 1849 he led a party through the redwoods to Humboldt Bay. Exhausted and half-starved, he fell from his horse and died near Clear Lake in February 1850.

What the plaque says

Fort Smith-Santa Fe Trail Gregg Route, 1840 Southwest of this marker are dim traces of overland trail to connect river ports of Fort Smith and Van Buren, Ark. with Santa Fe, a trade and travel center since 1609. This road was pioneered by Josiah Gregg, a Santa Fe trader who first passed this point on March 15, 1840. Many goldseekers later used his route--from the summer of 1849, when worldwide "fever" drew them to California. The Gregg Route, in the days before barbed wire, regularly was traveled by military parties, hunters, and traders. (1964)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Carson County Square House Museum — 15 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.
• Route 66 Sixth Street Historic District — 16 mi
  Thirteen blocks of Amarillo's streetcar suburb that Route 66 turned into a roadside strip, from the 1922 Nat to Texaco, Phillips and Dutch Mill stations, now shops and bars.
• Alibates Flint Quarries National Monument — 16 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.
• Helium Centennial Time Columns Monument — 18 mi
  Four sealed time capsules raised in Amarillo in 1968 for helium's centennial, in the city that for years produced almost all the world's commercial helium from the Cliffside field.

More markers nearby

• St. Francis Catholic Church Community — 6.0 mi
• First Tree Texas High Plains — 11 mi
• Town of Washburn — 12 mi
• General Ernest O. Thompson — 13 mi