Susan Shelby Magoffin — 1846, the Santa Fe Trail

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.