The Great Platte River Road

The heading on this marker is also the title of Merrill J. Mattes's history of this trail. Born in Illinois in 1910, Mattes joined the National Park Service in 1935 at Scotts Bluff and was its regional historian in Omaha from 1946 to 1966. The Nebraska State Historical Society published The Great Platte River Road: The Covered Wagon Mainline via Fort Kearny to Fort Laramie in 1969, built on the journals of several hundred emigrants, and the University of Nebraska Press reissued it in 1987. Mattes co-founded the Oregon-California Trails Association and died in Colorado in 1996.

What the plaque says

The Great Platte River Road The trail which followed the south side of the Platte River was the main route to Oregon and California. Fur traders going to the Rocky Mountains took the first wagons over the trail in 1830. Oregon-bound missionaries followed in the mid-1830s, and the first group of settlers embarked for Oregon in 1841. The number of emigrants reached 40,000 in 1849 after gold was discovered in California. Most emigrants traveled in ox-drawn wagons averaging about fifteen miles a day. In the 1850s and 1860s, freight wagons and stage- coaches carrying passengers and mail used the road. From April 1860 until October 1861, the Pony Express carried mail from St. Joseph, Missouri, to Sacramento, California. Fort Kearny (1848-1871), east of here, pro- vided protection and supplies for travelers. Supplies could also be purchased at nearby Dobytown. One of many road ranches along the Oregon-California Trail was located just south- east of this marker. Wagon travel on this overland route declined following the completion of the transcontinental railroad in 1869. Citizens of the area Nebraska State Historical Society

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Fort Kearny State Historical Park — 4.1 mi
  The 1848 army post on the Platte, built on a strip of Pawnee land bought for $2,000 in goods, where emigrant wagons passed by the thousand and only the cottonwoods outlasted the fort.
• Rowe Sanctuary — 10 mi
  Audubon's sanctuary on the Platte near Gibbon, where the river's sandbars are kept bare so that sandhill cranes, more than a million in the valley each spring, can roost safely at night.

More markers nearby

• Dobytown — 2.2 mi
• Historic Kearney — 2.4 mi
• The Great Plains — 2.4 mi
• University of Nebraska at Kearney — 3.4 mi