This historical marker stands just off Broadway and Market Streets in downtown St. Louis. The marker reads:
St Charles Rock Road
Boones Lick Road
St. Louis
First Trail West
started near this corner 1764.
marked by the
Daughters of the
American Revolution
and the
State of Missouri.
1913
Rededicated 1970-DAR
"The Boone Trace to the Salt Lick: Blazed in 1805 by Nathan and Daniel Morgan Boone and several others to go from the Boone Settlement to the Boone's Lick Salt Works some 140 miles into the uninhabited interior to the west. This trail was the first and only trail used by the earliest Americans west of the Mississippi River, until after the War of 1812." (
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"In 1805, Daniel Boone’s sons, Nathan Boone and his brother Daniel Morgan Boone, seized on Nathan’s recent discovery of a salt lick more than 100 miles west on Salt Creek in Howard County. The salt lick, named such because of the deer and other animals that came to lick the salt, was a great find. These animal trails to the lick also served native Americans, and also later travelers. By boiling down gallons of this salty water, the Boones could extract salt used for preserving meat and other tasks.
They soon established a sizable extraction operation at this site, hauling the salt out by boat. The route they traveled to the lick started as a Native American trace, however, as travel increased it grew to be a trail across Eastern Missouri." (
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"The importance of the Boone’s Lick Trail and its predecessor, the Boone Trace, cannot be overstated, says Kamper, resident historian at the Daniel Boone Home and Boonesfield Village in southern St. Charles County.
“The Boone’s Lick Trail was the only trail people were using going west until you got to the Oregon Trail and the Sante Fe Trail,” he says. “It was a major corridor for 40 years.”
The Boone’s Lick Trail carried travelers as far west as Franklin, where the Sante Fe Trail began. In New Franklin, back-to-back markers recognize the end and beginning of the two trails. Ironically, the Boone’s Lick Trail marker is scarcely noticed as flowers surrounding the much larger Sante Fe Trail marker cover it.
Often what brought settlers along these trails was Daniel Boone himself. Throughout his life Boone opened an ever-westward-reaching frontier, first leading settlers across the Blue Ridge Mountains into Kentucky and later into Missouri.
“This is the guy who is moving America westward,” Kamper says.
Boone came to Missouri, then a Spanish territory, in 1799. Lured by an offer of a generous land grant for himself and every family that followed, the Boones settled in the Femme Osage Creek Valley, not far from the Missouri River at present-day Matson. The settlement, arguably the westernmost American village at the time, was noted in the journals of Meriwether Lewis and William Clark.
In 1805 the Boone brothers located a salt lick in Howard County, in present-day central Missouri. Salt was essential for settlers, who used it to cure meat. The Boones established a business, boiling water from the saline spring and shipping the precious salt 160 miles down the Missouri River to the Boone settlement.
Initially, settlers traveled to this new outpost along the Boone Trace, a barely marked footpath that followed the river to the lick. In 1808 Nathan Boone led a group of militiamen under the command of William Clark — then returned from his historic voyage — from St. Charles to Franklin, near the salt works. Their path, a few miles north of the Boone Trace, eventually became the Boone’s Lick Trail.
There are no public remnants of the original trail today. Instead, its course became “the state road” prior to the 20th century. The route closely paralleled today’s Highway N through St. Charles and Warren counties and Interstate 70 from Warrenton to Boonville.
In fact, it could be said that the Boone’s Lick Trail gave birth to the interstate. In 1911, the Daughters of the American Revolution led a crusade for a national highway built along the old frontier roads. Missourians, especially the Missouri Good Roads Committee, led that fight. Their determination that the pioneer paths form the basis of the national road system won the day.
Much of the Boone’s Lick Trail became U.S. Highway 40 and later I-70. In fact, the first section of the interstate completed was just a few blocks from the beginning of the Boone’s Lick Trail." (
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