Most people who’ve heard of the Santa Fe Trail picture it out west — wagon ruts in the Kansas prairie, adobe walls in New Mexico. But the trail’s true starting point is a short drive from Rocheport, at a townsite so quiet most people drive right past it without knowing. Here’s how to see it: the actual place American traders first set out for Santa Fe, the salt spring that got the whole region moving, and the river town at the far edge of our own counties where that first journey crossed the Missouri.
Old Franklin, where it actually began
On September 1, 1821, William Becknell — a debt-ridden Franklin trader — set out from Franklin, Missouri with a handful of companions bound for Santa Fe, opening a trade route that would run for the next sixty years. The National Park Service calls him the “father of the Santa Fe Trail,” and the timing mattered as much as the route: Mexico had just won independence from Spain, and for the first time American traders could deal with Santa Fe legally.
The Franklin Becknell left isn’t the Franklin on the map today. Old Franklin, once the largest town west of St. Louis, sat right on the Missouri River. Flooding in the mid-to-late 1820s wrecked it, and residents rebuilt a few miles northeast on higher ground as New Franklin. The original 1821 townsite is marked today with a stone marker and wayside exhibits, just north of the river and about half a mile west of the Boonville bridge on Highway 87; you can also see the site from the Harley Park Overlook across the river in Boonville. In downtown New Franklin, a 19,600-pound red granite boulder carries a bronze plaque naming Becknell “father of the Santa Fe Trail,” dedicated by the Missouri Daughters of the American Revolution in 1909 and rededicated in 2021 for the trail’s bicentennial.
The road that got them there — Boone’s Lick
Before Becknell headed to Santa Fe, the road he used to get there already existed. The Boone’s Lick Road was worn in by traders hauling salt out of a spring near present-day Boonville, where Nathan and Daniel Morgan Boone — sons of Daniel Boone, not the frontiersman himself — started boiling brine around 1805. As the National Park Service puts it, “the terminus of Boone’s Lick Road became the start of the Santa Fe Trail in 1821.” Today, Boone’s Lick State Historic Site preserves the spring itself: a short, steep trail leads down to it past an old iron salt kettle and wooden remnants of the works, off Highway 187 east of Arrow Rock.
What you’ll actually see driving it
Don’t go looking for wagon ruts on this stretch — the well-preserved ones are mostly out around Kansas City and into Kansas, and the National Park Service’s own list of rut sites doesn’t include anything in Howard, Cooper, Boone, or Saline County. What you will find is markers, a river crossing, and a couple of stops worth the time: Boonville’s River, Rails and Trails Museum, right by the Katy Trailhead in the Depot District, has a Santa Fe Trail exhibit with a period wagon. From Boonville, Missouri 41 runs north off I-70 toward Arrow Rock, with the junction itself signed as the Santa Fe National Historic Trail.
Arrow Rock, the honest ending
Arrow Rock isn’t technically in our counties — it’s just over the line in Saline — but it’s the natural place to end this drive, because it’s where the earliest Santa Fe travelers crossed the Missouri River by ferry. The town itself, a National Historic Landmark since the early 1960s, is small enough to walk in an afternoon: the 1834 J. Huston Tavern, still serving meals and widely described as the oldest continuously operating restaurant west of the Mississippi; the Lyceum Theatre, staging plays in a former church; and George Caleb Bingham’s house, preserved much as the painter left it. The Arrow Rock State Historic Site visitor center is open daily, 10 a.m. to 4 p.m., most of the year.
A day trip from Rocheport
Old Franklin, Boone’s Lick, and Arrow Rock make a loose loop of roughly sixty miles round trip from Rocheport, mostly on Highway 87 and Missouri 41 with a short stretch of I-70 in between. Plan on half a day, more if you stop for lunch at the Tavern. It’s a quieter way to spend a Saturday than the trail’s western end ever gets, and it starts closer to home than most people realize — the whole 800-to-900-mile trail to Santa Fe began, more or less, in Howard County.