The Vieux Crossing

The zoologist the plaque places at this crossing in 1819 was a Philadelphia Quaker, great-grandson of the botanist John Bartram, now called the father of American descriptive entomology. Thomas Say had helped found the Academy of Natural Sciences of Philadelphia in 1812 and served as zoologist on Stephen Long's 1819-20 expedition to the Rocky Mountains. The official account of that journey carried the first scientific descriptions of the coyote, the swift fox, the western kingbird, the lark sparrow, the collared lizard and the flycatcher later named Say's phoebe, among other animals still found along this road.

What the plaque says

The Vieux Crossing A few miles to the northwest, the Oregon- California Trail crossed the Vermillion Creek, heading toward the Pacific from the "jumping off" towns on the Missouri River. The crossing was named for Louis Vieux, a Potawatomi leader of French and Native American lineage who established a toll bridge there in the 1850s. Charging a dollar per outfit, he is said to have made as much as $300 per day during busy times. In addition, he supplied emigrants with hay and grain. As early as 1819, Thomas Say, zoologist for Stephen H. Long's expedition, camped near the crossing. John C. Fremont came in 1842, guided by Kit Carson, and in 1846 the ill-fated Donner party passed by. Beginning in 1853 the military road from Fort Leavenworth to Fort Riley crossed here, as did the stage line to Denver in 1859. Horace Greeley, a famous newspaper editor and onetime stage passenger, described a meal he had at the crossing as "the hardest I ever paid half a dollar for." In 1849 tragedy struck when cholera took the lives of emigrants camped at the crossing. They were buried on the creekbank, as were others who died on the trail. On a nearby hill the graves of Louis Vieux, some of his family, and other early settlers can be seen in the Vieux Cemetery. Erected by Kansas State Historical Society & Kansas Department of Transportation

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Flint Hills Discovery Center — 19 mi
  Manhattan's city-run museum of the tallgrass prairie, opened in 2012 at the edge of downtown, and the place to have the Flint Hills explained before driving into them.
• Prairie Peoples Park (Prairie Band Potawatomi Nation) — 22 mi
  The Prairie Band Potawatomi Nation's powwow grounds west of Mayetta, on the reservation the band held when most Potawatomi in Kansas took allotments and the promise of citizenship.
• Konza Prairie Biological Station — 23 mi
  Kansas State's research prairie south of Manhattan, named for the Kanza, where every watershed burns on its own schedule and a public nature trail climbs from Kings Creek to the open hills.

More markers nearby

• Louis Vieux — 3.6 mi
• St. Marys — 7.8 mi
• Bluestem in the Flint Hills / Beecher Bibles — 12 mi
• Historical Kansas — 12 mi