Susan Shelby Magoffin — 1846, the Santa Fe Trail

Summary

In June of 1846 an eighteen-year-old bride from a prominent Kentucky family climbed into a fitted carriage and rolled out of Independence, Missouri, down the Santa Fe Trail toward Mexico. Her name was Susan Shelby Magoffin, and the diary she kept of the next fifteen months — published long after her death as "Down the Santa Fe Trail and into Mexico" — is among the most vivid and intimate records we have of the trail in the year the United States went to war with Mexico.

For generations she was called the first American woman to travel the full Santa Fe Trail. That claim has since been corrected — a trader's wife named Mary Donoho crossed in 1833, thirteen years earlier — but it takes nothing from Susan's diary, for no woman left so rich an account of the route. Susan was the granddaughter of Isaac Shelby, the first governor of Kentucky, and newly married to Samuel Magoffin, an established Santa Fe trader whose brother James was deep in the diplomacy and intrigue of the American conquest of New Mexico. She went not as a settler bound for free land but as a merchant's wife traveling with his caravan of trade goods — fourteen big wagons, a baggage wagon, a carriage, servants, even chickens — and her diary records a sheltered, educated young woman thrown into the heat, dust, danger and wonder of the trail and a foreign country at war.

The journey carried her down the Arkansas to Bent's Fort, on to a Santa Fe newly occupied by General Stephen Watts Kearny's Army of the West, and then south along the Camino Real into the heart of Mexico — toward El Paso and Chihuahua — moving in the wake of the invading army. She traveled, in effect, in the baggage of a war, and her diary is one of the few civilian, female eyewitness accounts of the Mexican-American War from inside Mexico.

It is also a record of private grief. At Bent's Fort, just after her nineteenth birthday, Susan suffered a miscarriage; later, gravely ill in Mexico, she gave birth to a son who did not survive — two children lost within a year. She came home alive but worn down, and she died young, at twenty-eight, her health never fully recovered. Her book, unknown for two generations, was finally published in 1926 and at once recognized as a classic of the overland and Southwestern frontier.

Timeline

The Departure

Susan Shelby was barely eighteen when she married Samuel Magoffin on November 25, 1845. He was a Kentucky-born trader of long experience on the Santa Fe Trail, a man of means in his forties; she was a sheltered, well-read girl from one of Kentucky's first families, granddaughter of Governor Isaac Shelby and born near Danville in 1827. When Samuel set out in the summer of 1846 with his annual caravan of trade goods for Santa Fe and Chihuahua, Susan went with him — a wedding journey of the most extraordinary kind, fitted out in comparative luxury with a carriage, a tent, servants, books, and a writing desk on which she kept her diary.

They left Independence, Missouri, on June 10, 1846, just weeks after the United States had declared war on Mexico. The timing shaped everything. Samuel's brother, James Wiley Magoffin, was a key figure in the American effort to take New Mexico — by some accounts smoothing the way for Kearny's bloodless entry into Santa Fe — and the Magoffin caravan moved down the trail in the shadow of the Army of the West. Susan understood she was traveling into a war, but the early weeks read more like an adventure: she delights in the novelty of camp life, the prairie storms, the buffalo, and the freedom of the open road, confiding to her diary the small joys and discomforts of a bride at large on the plains.

Her diary begins almost girlishly and grows steadily deeper. She records her homesickness and her devotion to Samuel — whom she calls "mi alma," my soul — her religious reflections, and her wide-eyed observations of everything new. She writes of the "perfect independence" of prairie life and the free, uncontaminated air of the open country. She was, by her own cheerful admission, a pampered young woman utterly unprepared for what the trail would ask of her, and the gap between her expectations and what was coming gives the diary much of its poignancy.

The Route

The Magoffin caravan followed the Santa Fe Trail southwest from Independence across present Kansas, tracing the route along the Arkansas River that traders had used for a generation. Susan's diary becomes a running account of the trail's particular trials: the choking dust, the violent thunderstorms that flattened her tent and soaked her bedding, the mosquitoes, the heat, and the monotony broken by the spectacle of the buffalo herds. She describes the discipline of the caravan, the night camps, the river crossings, and the constant low anxiety of moving through Indian country and, now, a country at war.

A central episode of the journey was Bent's Fort, the great adobe trading post on the Arkansas that served as the staging point and supply depot for Kearny's invasion. The Magoffins reached it on July 27, 1846, and stayed while the army gathered and pushed on toward New Mexico. Susan recorded the fort's adobe walls, its dirt floors and log ceilings, the bustle of soldiers and traders. It is here that the diary turns from adventure to ordeal: on July 30, her nineteenth birthday, she fell ill, and within a day she suffered a miscarriage. In the same hours she noted, with quiet wonder and a touch of envy, an Indian woman in a nearby lodge who gave birth and was at the river bathing within the half hour — a contrast to her own confinement that she recorded without self-pity.

Delayed by her illness, the caravan left Bent's Fort in mid-August and moved on toward Santa Fe by way of Raton Pass and the Mountain Branch, descending into a New Mexico that Kearny's army had just taken without a battle. Susan entered Santa Fe on August 31, 1846, among the first American women to do so under the new flag, and her diary opens a window on the occupied capital: the markets and adobe houses, the Catholic services she attended with fascination and some Protestant unease, the fandangos, the food — she learned to like chile and the local dishes — and the Mexican and Pueblo people she met, whom she observed with curiosity, condescension, and a growing, genuine sympathy. From Santa Fe the Magoffins, instead of turning home, prepared to go deeper, south into Mexico itself, following the trade and the war toward Chihuahua.

The Crossing

The deeper passage of the journey is where Susan Shelby Magoffin's diary becomes both a war chronicle and a record of suffering. Through the autumn and winter of 1846-47 the caravan moved south down the Camino Real from Santa Fe — toward El Paso del Norte and then across the deserts toward Chihuahua — in the wake and sometimes the danger of Colonel Doniphan's campaign. Susan, a young American woman traveling through enemy country, lived with the constant possibility of capture or violence, and she records the rumors of battle, the captured towns, and the tension of being a civilian inside an invasion. Her husband and his brother were trading and maneuvering between both sides, and their safety, and hers, was never certain.

Illness shadowed the southern leg. In Mexico Susan contracted what she and her contemporaries called yellow fever during an epidemic, and she fell gravely sick. She had become pregnant again after the loss at Bent's Fort, and in the grip of her illness she gave birth to a son who lived only a short time and died — a second child lost in the space of a year. The diary, which began in girlish high spirits, now carries the weight of real grief and physical ruin. Yet she keeps writing: her faith, her love for Samuel, and her stubborn powers of observation never quite fail her, and she continues to set down the strange, vivid life of a country at war.

The diary's enduring power lies in this fusion of the public and the intimate — a teenage bride recording the conquest of the Southwest from inside a trader's tent. Her entries hold her homesick prayers and her wry self-deprecation; she calls her husband "mi alma" and chides herself for her ignorance of Spanish and of hardship. She describes Mexican domestic life, religious processions, and the ordinary people caught in the war with a humanity rare in the conqueror's literature. The journal runs to its last entry on September 8, 1847, as the Magoffins, after their long passage through northern Mexico, turned at last back toward the United States — Susan worn thin by fever, miscarriage, and the loss of two children, but alive.

Arrival & After

The Magoffins turned homeward as the diary closed in September 1847 and made their way back to the United States, and Susan never fully recovered the health the journey had taken from her. After the war the couple returned for a time to Kentucky and later settled near Barrett's Station, outside Kirkwood, Missouri. Susan bore daughters in 1851 and 1855, but her constitution had been undermined by the fever and the losses of 1846-47.

Susan Shelby Magoffin died on October 26, 1855, in St. Louis, only twenty-eight years old, after the birth of her last child — a life cut short, in the judgment of those who have studied her, by the lingering toll of the journey she had made as a teenage bride. Had she lived longer she might have written more; instead her single great work is the diary of that one extraordinary year, the testament of a privileged girl who crossed into a foreign war and came back changed and diminished by it.

The diary itself had a long sleep. It remained a family manuscript for some seventy years until the historian Stella M. Drumm edited it and the Yale University Press published it in 1926 as "Down the Santa Fe Trail and into Mexico: The Diary of Susan Shelby Magoffin, 1846-1847." Reissued many times since, it has become a cornerstone of Santa Fe Trail and Mexican-American War scholarship and one of the most beloved women's narratives of the American West — proof that the conquest of the Southwest can be read, vividly and humanely, through the eyes of an eighteen-year-old bride who refused to stop writing even as the trail took nearly everything from her but her voice.

Lessons

References

• Susan Shelby Magoffin Wikipedia
• Down the Santa Fé Trail and into Mexico (full text, 1926 ed.) Internet Archive
• Susan Shelby Magoffin State Historical Society of Missouri
• Susan Shelby Magoffin Encyclopaedia Britannica
• Santa Fe National Historic Trail National Park Service