Historical Marker
Fort Smith-Santa Fe Trail
Vega, Oldham County · Texas
Erected 1992
Gregg's own crossing of this county was eventful. He left Santa Fe on February 25, 1840, with forty-seven men, twenty-eight wagons, two cannon, 200 mules and 300 sheep and goats, bound east along the south side of the Canadian. Crossing the Panhandle in March, the party fought off an attack by a band of Pawnees near Trujillo Creek in present Oldham County, and a few days later a blue norther scattered most of the sheep and goats across the Llano Estacado for good. The expedition crossed the 100th meridian on March 23.
What the plaque says
Fort Smith-Santa Fe Trail What came to be known as the Fort Smith - Santa Fe Trail was first blazed in 1840 by Josiah Gregg, a trader seeking a route to Santa Fe along the south side of the Canadian River. In 1849, Gregg's route was closely followed by a military escort led by Capt. Randolph B. Marcy (1812-1857). Marcy's group traveled from Fort Smith, Arkansas to Santa Fe with about 500 pioneers heading for California. The party entered Oldham County on June 13th, and on June 14th ascended to the Llano Estacado near this site. Reaching the top, Marcy found the plains "as boundless...and trackless as the ocean...a desolate waste of uninhabited solitude." Eighty-five days after leaving Fort Smith, the party reached Santa Fe. After passing the plains, Marcy remarked, "I have never passed a country where wagons could move along with as much ease and facility, without expenditure of any labor in making a road, as upon this route." Marcy advocated the trail as a prospective route for a transcontinental railroad, which was built after the Civil War. Later, as the country entered the automobile age and the interstate highway system was developed, U.S. Highway 66 (Route 66) and Interstate 40 were laid close to the trail. (1992)
Where it stands
35.29023, -102.39708 · Directions
Worth the stop nearby
- Magnolia Station, Vega — 3.5 miA restored 1920s Magnolia filling station on Vega's Main Street, a barbershop after the pumps stopped in 1953, saved with a National Park Service grant.
- Route 66 Midpoint, Adrian — 16 miThe sign in Adrian that puts Chicago and Los Angeles 1,139 miles away in each direction, and across the road the 1928 cafe that took the midpoint for its name.
- Old Tascosa and the Julian Bivins Museum — 18 miThe 1884 stone courthouse of the Canadian River cowtown, later a ranch headquarters and the first home of Cal Farley's Boys Ranch, now a museum on the working campus.
- Cadillac Ranch — 24 miTen Cadillacs from 1949 to 1963 planted nose down in a pasture west of Amarillo by the Ant Farm collective in 1974, on private land where visitors are let in to paint them.