National Frontier Trails Museum

Independence was founded in 1827 as a village of a few hundred people at the western edge of Missouri, and within a few years it was where the West bought its supplies. It became the eastern end of the Santa Fe Trail, a 900-mile foreign trade route opened in 1821, and later the outfitting town for the Oregon and California trails, heavily traveled from 1843. Each spring the town center filled with wagons, teams, livestock and tents while trains were bought, loaded and organized. Lilburn Boggs, later governor, moved his trading business here from Sibley, near Fort Osage, because the new boomtown was displacing almost every other outfitting center.

The museum, run by the City of Independence, tells the departures in the travelers' own words. A 17-minute introductory film called West opens the visit, and the gallery sets excerpts from journals and diaries beside illustrations and artifacts, with sections on Lewis and Clark, the fur trappers and traders, and the Latter-day Saints who went west to Utah from 1846.

The deeper collection is the Merrill J. Mattes Research Library. Mattes, an award-winning National Park Service historian, co-founder of the Oregon-California Trails Association and author of The Platte River Road, gave his library of 1,350 volumes in 1991. It now holds more than 3,000 volumes and over 2,300 trail diaries, letters and recollections, several of them originals, along with maps, photographs and fifty cubic feet of manuscripts. Anyone may use it free, by appointment.