High Quality Content by WIKIPEDIA articles! Council Bluffs, known until 1852 as Kanesville, Iowa — the historic starting point of the Mormon Trail and eventual northernmost anchor town of the other emigrant trails — is a city in and the county seat of Pottawattamie County, Iowa, United States and is on the east bank of the Missouri River across from what is now the much larger city of Omaha, Nebraska. Settlers departing west into the sparsely settled unorganized parts of the Territory of Missouri to the Oregon Country and the newly conquered California Territory through the (eventual) Nebraska Territory from Kanesville traveled by wagon trains along the much storied Oregon, Mormon, or California Trails into the newly expanded United States western lands — after the first large organized wagon trains left Missouri in 1841, the annual migration waves began in earnest by spring of 1843 and built up thereafter with the opening of the Mormon Trail (1846) until peaking in the later 1860s when news of railroad progress had a braking effect. By the 1860s virtually all migration wagon trains were passing near the renamed town. The wagon train trails became less important with the advent of the first complete transcontinental railway in 1869 but while trail use diminished after that, their use continued on at lesser rates until late in the nineteenth century.