Westport, one of the oldest neighborhoods in the Kansas City area, is the place where the American West effectively began. In the 1830s, before Kansas City itself existed, Westport was a bustling frontier trading post — the last place emigrants could outfit themselves with supplies before leaving civilization behind and heading west along the Santa Fe, Oregon, and California Trails. General stores stocked everything a wagon train needed: flour, salt pork, tools, rope, rifles, and medicine.
The Missouri River landing four miles north was where goods arrived by steamboat from St. Louis, and Westport was where those goods were transformed into trail provisions. The Mexican merchants who ran the Santa Fe trade, the mountain men returning from the Rockies with beaver pelts, the missionaries heading to Oregon, and the fortune-seekers bound for California all passed through this neighborhood. By the 1840s, Westport was one of the most cosmopolitan places on the American frontier — a meeting point of cultures, languages, and ambitions.
The bars and restaurants that line these streets today occupy buildings whose predecessors witnessed the entire era of westward expansion.