Wagon Bed Spring (also Lower Spring or Lower Cimarron Spring), located in Grant County, Kansas, was an important watering spot on the Cimarron Cutoff of the Santa Fe Trail. The flow of the spring came from an outcropping of the Ogallala Formation. Center pivot irrigation adjacent to the spring resulted in lowering of the water table and the spring ceased to flow in the 1960s. A number of small artifacts dating from the days of the Santa Fe Trail have been recovered from lands near the spring which were used by both American Indians and wagon trains as a campground. The name "wagon bed" dates from later use of an old wagon bed as a trough to collect water from the spring. There is a foundation on the site of an ice house. Floods have changed the course of the Cimarron River; the site of the spring is now in the bed of the river rather than on its bank as it was in the days of the Santa Fe Trail.
It was declared a National Historic Landmark in 1961.
It is located about 12 miles (19 km) south of Ulysses, on the west side of US 270.
Famous quotes containing the words wagon, bed and/or spring:
“Here’s to five miserable months on the wagon and the irreparable harm that it’s caused me.”
—Stanley Kubrick (b. 1928)
“I can get dressed earlier in the evening with every intention of going to a dance at midnight, but somehow after the theatre the thing to do seems to be either to go to bed or sit around somewhere. It doesn’t seem possible that somewhere people can be expecting you at an hour like that.”
—Robert Benchley (1889–1945)
“In almost all climes the tortoise and the frog are among the precursors and heralds of this season, and birds fly with song and glancing plumage, and plants spring and bloom, and winds blow, to correct this slight oscillation of the poles and preserve the equilibrium of nature.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)