FORT LEAVENWORTH-FORT SCOTT MILITARY ROAD

The 1837 survey of the middle section of this road ran west of the Missouri state line.
By the latter 1850's the actual highway, however, avoided some of the more difficult terrain by crossing into Missouri. The broken line shows the road as it appeared on a map of 1857. Other maps of the period show some variations. (See, also, Endnote 54) 

54. As originally surveyed in 1837, the entire section of the frontier military highway later known as the Fort Leavenworth-Fort Scott military road ran west of the Missouri state line. Maps of the latter 1850's show the road within R. 25 E from Fort Scott north to northern Johnson county before it turned northwest to Fort Leavenworth, but these maps vary considerably in locating certain portions of the highway.

The Whitman and Searl "Map of Eastern Kansas," published in 1856 independently of the public surveys then in progress, traced the road entirely within Kansas territory. Almost all the later maps (1857 to 1860) were compiled from land office surveys but they show variations of as much as five or six miles in certain sections of the route. Some traced the road into Missouri for a very short distance at the Johnson-Lykins (Miami) county line, and nearly all ran it into Missouri for a mile or two at the Lykins-Linn boundary (see cut opposite p. 129).

The available Kansas maps of the 1850's do not show the road running south from Fort Scott toward Fort Gibson and Arkansas. This was because the region south was Indian land. It was not until the latter 1860's when these Indians by treaties began to give up their lands in exchange for other reservations and concessions that this portion of Kansas was surveyed. The first plats for this area in the office of the state auditor are dated in 1866 and 1867.

The surveyors designated the highway as the "Military Road and Fort Scott to Ark.," tracing it near the Missouri border through Crawford county, passing through the present towns of Arcadia and Mulberry. In Cherokee county the road swung a few miles to the west and left the state south of Baxter Springs.

Although the military highway as shown on these plats may have little relation to the road of the 1840'd, it nevertheless seems likely that some sections of the original were retained in subsequent highway changes.

Rep. F. A. Jewell, Bourbon county, introduced a bill in the 1917 legislature to provide an appropriation "to write and publish a history of, and mark with monuments, the old military road in the state of Kansas. . . ." The proposal was turned down in committee. --- See House Journal, Kansas, 1917, pp. 236, 360.