The Great Platte River Road

For generations Nebraska’s Platte Valley provided a natural east-west travel route for native peoples, fur traders, explorers, emigrants, and the military. The first known passage by white men along the Great Platte River Road in the Keith County vicinity was in 1813. Robert Stuart and a party of fur hunters were returning east from Astoria on the Pacific Northwest Coast.<p> The Astorians were followed in 1820 by Major Stephen Long’s exploring party that ascended the Platte and South Plate to the Rocky Mountains. In 1830 fur trader William Sublette led the first wagon caravan along the Platte to the trappers’ rendezvous in Wyoming. His trek proved that wagons could cross the mountains, showing the way for thousands of overland emigrants to come in the 1840s and 1850s.