This multiplicity of routes across the open plains was to be expected, for there were no large rivers and no mountains to cross on the way. At first travelers all chose one of the established trails for the first leg of the journey. The Santa Fe Trail would take them to the Arkansas River crossing, where a side road led upstream to Bent's Fort. From there the way was across trackless grasslands, but with Pike's Peak looming on the western horizon as a guide. Another good, well-traveled road led west from Omaha to Fort Kearney on the Platte, cutting off a toilsome stretch of the old Oregon Trail. From the fort the trail led up the south bank of the Platte to the forks, then directly up the South Platte to the mines. Both routes had good grass, water in the streams, and buffalo within hunting range.
Some adventurous men decided they could cut off fifty to a hundred miles by going west up the Kansas Valley and Smoky Hill Fork to its source, then west across the high plains to the mines. On this trail they would find some farms for 250 miles where they could get milk, butter, eggs, and vegetables. The drawbacks were that no road had been opened to the head of Smoky Hill Fork and that the last stretch was across dry country with poor grass, no game, and no water from July 1 until fall.
A fourth route, and probably the best, left the Missouri at Leaven-worth and led straight west along the high ground between the Platte and Kansas drainage basins until it struck the Republican Fork of the Kansas, about 120 miles out, and followed that stream to its head, only a short distance east of Cherry Creek and the mines. This route offered easy traveling, good grass and water, plenty of game, and a direct road. Once it was opened, it became the favorite.
Compared to the trail to California, the distance to the new mines was quite short, only about a third as far. A good outfit could make the trip in six weeks, while people who knew the road and traveled light often made it in thirty days. On the long trial to California a train had to leave the Missouri by early June to have any chance of crossing the Sierra Nevada before the snows came. The Colorado-bound people could start as late as November, trusting to luck that they would not be trapped in a blizzard.
At Marysville, Kansas, the newspaper on November 4, 1858, carried this item: ''Notwithstanding the lateness of the season, trains after trains continue to throng the road… bound for the new El Dorado."
As usual, many of the gold seekers started across the plains with rather skimpy outfits. On March 23, 1859, the Missouri Republican reported:
There are now hundreds starting on foot with nothing but a cotton sack and a few pounds of crackers and meat…. Some men with mining shovels over their shoulders and their diminutive carpet bags on the ends of them. There were not five days' provisions in the whole party. One party of sixteen to twenty started with one old horse, and fifty pounds of hard bread. Their intention was to kill game on the road and sleep in barns at night. They appeared to think that the prairies were covered with barns and sheds, built by the Indians to shelter buffalo.
Next up the scale, as reported on November 6, 1858, by the Kansas City Journal of Commerce, was "the wheelbarrow man who left here a few weeks ago for Pike's Peak, taking his whole outfit in a wheelbarrow, passed several ox trains, and at Council Grove overtook the party he set out to go with. He traveled from twenty to thirty miles a day."
Then, according to a contemporary letter, came the handcarts: "A party left here [Leavenworth] yesterday on foot for the mines with a hand cart ingeniously contrived to ford all the streams like a boat."
There were carts and wagons of all kinds, drawn by horses, mules, or oxen. All these people planned to hunt some buffalo along the way, and indeed there seemed to be plenty of meat for skilled hunters, with some lucky kills by the greenhorns. At times the herds were so thick, especially along the Santa Fe Trail and the Republican River route, that they became troublesome, even dangerous. Horace Greeley, a New York newspaperman, went to the mines in 1859 and left several good items about the buffalo, each written the day it happened.
"I know a million is a great many, but I am confident we saw that number yesterday. Certainly all we saw could not have stood on ten square miles of ground. Often the country for miles on either hand seemed quite black with them."
He mentioned the dangers on three different occasions:
"We met or passed today two parties of Pike's Peakers who have respectively lost three oxen or steers, stampeded last night by herds of buffalo. The mules at express stations have to be carefully watched to preserve them from a similar catastrophe."
"A party of our drivers, who went back seven miles on mules last evening… report that they found the road absolutely dangerous from the crowds of buffalo feeding on either side, and running across it… that, the night being quite dark, they were often in danger of being run over and run down by the headlong brutes."
"A herd of buffalo north of the road… were stampeded by an emigrant train…. A slight ridge hid them from Mr. F's sight until their leader came full tilt against his mule, knocking him down and going over him at full speed." Both Mr. F. and his mule were shaken, but not injured.
The throngs of travelers on the four trails cutting through the heart of the buffalo country produced a great deal of disturbance among the buffalo. Each party had at least one hunter trying to kill an animal for meat each day or two, and most of the other people seemed to delight in shooting into the herds even when they did not expect to kill anything. The shooting and other activities of the travelers produced a great many stampedes, some of them involving many thousands of animals. It is probable that the large herd that came from the Republican River range and crossed to the north bank of the Platte had been started north by just such a stampede, for no large herd had crossed the Platte since the big California rush had scared the buffalo out of the Platte Valley.
The little town of Wood River Center on the north bank of the Platte was almost overrun by this buffalo herd. The local paper carried the story:
As we sometimes since predicted, our beautiful town site has been rudely trampled upon by those ugly-looking wild beasts known as buffalo…. We intend to keep some weapons handy, so that, should they kick up too much dust around our office, or rob the porkers of their accustomed slop, we shall not be responsible for their safety. We are determined not to be bit by the ugly scamps, at all hazards, and should the ECHO fail to make its accustomed visit, it may be inferred that either ourself or some huge buffalo has fallen, and perchance, editor, printer and devil may for the moment have forgotten their duty, whilst regaling upon the finest broiled ribs.
A month later the buffalo were in town again. They broke into a garden and ate up all the corn. The townspeople shot a large number just across the Wood River. Even though they saved the hides and some of the meat, enough carrion was left to ripen in the summer sun and send a powerful stench across the stream into town.
This visit in 1860 marks the last recorded passage of a large herd of buffalo across the Platte in either direction. The separation of the buffalo into the southern and northern herds was complete.
The huge volume of travel along the Platte in 1849 and the following years had annoyed and troubled the Indian tribes near the trail, but for the most part the wagon trains had been confined to a corridor between tribal holdings. This new rush into Colorado, starting in 1858 and increasing greatly in the next two years, not only put more people along the old Oregon and Santa Fe trails but also opened up two new trails in the buffalo country. These travelers, instead of going on to distant places, stopped and occupied the foothill country that the southern Arapahoes and the southern Cheyennes had used for a winter range for fifty years or more. Here were sheltered valleys, plenty of wood, and buffalo nearby. A miner on Cherry Creek in January 1859 wrote that immense herds of buffalo ranged there during severe winters.