When gold was discovered in California in 1849, a wagon train from Fayetteville went west through the Cherokee Nation, adding Cherokee travelers to their number and continuing across southern Kansas, following the Arkansas River and crossing the Santa Fe Trail before joining north-south trails along the front range of the Rocky Mountains in Colorado.
The trail that these Arkansas and Cherokee Forty-Niners blazed from Fayetteville to about where present-day Colorado Springs is became known as the Cherokee Trail.