TRAIL DIARIES EXCERPTS

Trails Head Chapter of Oregon-California Trails Association wishes to give you a sense of the trail travelers who moved west on the Santa Fe, Oregon, and California trails in the Kansas City area, where those three trails used the same Independence and Westport routes. Since the area of concern for Trails Head goes beyond St. Marys, Kansas, the voices of trail travelers on the Oregon and California trails from Johnson County to beyond St. Marys also are provided. 

The name of the chapter derives from the fact that both Independence and Westport served as trailheads for a period of time. Traders and emigrants outfitted at those two towns before heading west to Santa Fe, Oregon, and California. The nineteenth-century historic trail network actually was quite dynamic, with trailheads changing in popularity. The trailhead of the Santa Fe Trail originally was in Franklin, Missouri, but migrated west. As time progressed, many heading west to Oregon and California also left from the St. Joseph and the Omaha-Council Bluffs areas. Yet other trailheads became jumping off places. Within the vicinity of each jumping off place, frequently a network of roads and river landings came to be used. Fort Leavenworth and Liberty Landing were vital locations within the region of what would become the Greater Kansas City area. 

This website is not providing complete diaries or memoirs, but rather is giving excerpts when writers describe specific sites or areas. Those nineteenth-century writers sometimes often misspelled words and may not have used proper grammar. Those misspellings and grammatical variations are retained in these excerpts, although frequently the word “sic” follows a spelling that might be assumed to be a modern typo. The trail diary excerpts are arranged in trail geographical order by current counties, that is Jackson County in Missouri, followed by Johnson, Douglas, Shawnee, and Pottawatomie counties in Kansas. Clay County of Missouri and Leavenworth County of Kansas are at the end, as travel to and from Liberty and to and from Leavenworth added to the possibilities of nineteenth-century travelers through what would become the metropolitan Kansas City area and beyond.   

If you wish to read some diary excerpts associated with specific trail sites, please select from the List of Counties as trail diary excerpts are listed by county.

JACKSON COUNTY, MISSOURI

CLAY COUNTY, MISSOURI

JOHNSON COUNTY, KANSAS

DOUGLAS COUNTY, KANSAS

SHAWNEE COUNTY, KANSAS

POTTAWATOMIE COUNTY, KANSAS

LEAVENWORTH COUNTY, KANSAS

If you wish to know locations of Trail of Death markers, click on the following links:

MARKERS OF POTAWATOMI TRAIL OF DEATH

 TRAIL OF DEATH ROUTE MAP