Fort Smith-Santa Fe Trail
Borger, Hutchinson County, Texas
Marker Inscription
Josiah Gregg (1806-50) blazed the Fort Smith-Santa Fe Trail in 1840 as a shorter route between the U.S. and New Mexico. He crossed this site on March 17, 1840, while returning to Arkansas from a trading expedition to Santa Fe and Chihuahua. In a book, "Commerce of the Prairies", published in 1844, Gregg recommended the new route, which paralleled the Canadian River. Over 2,000 California-bound gold seekers traveled it in 1849. The largest wagon train of that year was accompanied by U.S. Army troops commanded by Captain Randolph B. Marcy (1812-87), who made a survey of the trail for a proposed national wagon road. Marcy's party crossed this site on June 9, 1849. The extensive use of the Fort Smith-Santa Fe Trail in the early 1850s caused it to be considered as a favorable route for a transcontinental railroad. Lt. A. W. Whipple of the Army Corps of Engineer surveyed a possible route in the summer of 1853. By the late 1850s, emigrants were traveling a more southern road through El Paso, which was eventually to become the southern railroad route, and the Fort Smith-Santa Fe Trail fell into disuse and was finally abandoned. In many places on the Plains, the wagon ruts are still visible in the undisturbed prairie sod. (1974)
Erected by Texas Historical Commission
The Story
In 1840 the trader and author Josiah Gregg blazed a shorter path between Arkansas and New Mexico, crossing this stretch of the Texas Panhandle as he returned from Santa Fe and Chihuahua. His popular 1844 account recommended the route, and within a decade thousands of California gold seekers followed it westward, some escorted by U.S. Army officers surveying it for a wagon road and even a railroad. By the late 1850s traffic shifted to a southern road, and the trail fell silent, its wagon ruts still faintly visible in the prairie sod.
Why it matters
This trail marks a chapter in the westward push across the continent, when trade, gold fever, and railroad dreams together carved the routes that would knit the nation from coast to coast.
Own a business near here? Add it to the map.
Related people
- · Josiah Gregg
- · Randolph B. Marcy
- · A. W. Whipple
Related events
- · California Gold Rush
Themes & tags
Nearby & related markers
Plemons Cemetery
Borger, TX
Plemons rose about 1898 when rancher James Whittenburg dug in above a bend of the Canadian River, and it briefly thrived—chosen county seat in 1901, with a brick courthouse, a scatter of shops, and even a hotel run for a time by former buffalo hunter and county sheriff Billy Dixon. Its cemetery began around 1902 with the burial of Mrs. E.E. Akers. But when the railroad bypassed the town for Stinnett in 1926, voters moved the county seat and Plemons faded; an oil boom stretched its life another two decades before the last burial in 1953.
Route of Tascosa-Dodge City Trail
Dumas, TX
As ranchers and merchants settled the Texas Panhandle in the 1870s, they needed a reliable supply line to distant markets. Established in 1877, this trail carried cattle drives and freight wagons from Tascosa to Dodge City, Kansas, and doubled as a stagecoach and mail route. When the railroad arrived in 1887, both the trail and the once-thriving town of Tascosa fell into decline, and Tascosa eventually faded away.
Red River Expedition of 1852
Pampa, TX
In the summer of 1852, U.S. Army Captain Randolph B. Marcy and Lieutenant George B. McClellan led an expedition into the still little-mapped Texas Panhandle to trace the elusive headwaters of the Red River. Their survey identified two forks reaching the 100th Meridian, a distinction that mattered enormously because earlier treaties had used the river as a boundary without specifying which channel was meant. Decades later, in 1896, the courts settled on the South Branch as the true main stream, fixing the line between Texas and Oklahoma.
Site of Old Zulu Stockade
Morse, TX
In 1873 the English-born hunters Jim and Bob Cator wintered a buffalo camp on the plains above the Canadian River, in what became the first permanent settlement of the Texas Panhandle. By 1875 it had grown into a two-room trading post stocked with groceries and ammunition—the first north of the Canadian—wryly named Zulu for the African warriors then in the news. As a depot on the Fort Dodge–Fort Bascom military road it served hunters, soldiers, and freighters until it was finally abandoned in 1912.