In November 1845, Susan Shelby, age 18, married Samuel Magoffin, age 45. Eight months after their marriage they embarked on a journey down the Santa Fe Trail that would conclude fifteen months later in Chihuahua, Mexico. On her journey she kept a journal which began with the above quote.
Susan had been born into a wealthy and influential family on a Kentucky plantation. In fact, her grandfather had been the first governor of the state. Her husband was a prosperous trader who had accumulated a sizeable fortune while engaging in the Santa Fe trade.
To protect against marauding bands of Indians, especially the feared Comanche, the traders traveled in large caravans, and the Magoffin entourage made up a large part of this particular caravan.
Susan described it this way:
“We now numbered, ourselves only, quite a force. Fourteen big waggons, with six yoke [oxen] each, one baggage waggon with two yoke, one Dearborn with two mules (this concern carries my maid), our own carriage with two more mules and two men on mules driving the loose stock, consisting of nine and a half yoke of oxen, our riding horses two, and three mules….we number twenty men, three are our tent servants (Mexicans). Jane, my attendant [maid], two horses, nine mules, some two hundred oxen, and last, though not least our dog Ring.”
A carriage, servants, an attendant? Well, that isn’t the whole picture. One of the servants was a cook. The other tent servants’ jobs included staking out a large tent at the end of each day in which the Magoffins would spend their evenings. Luxuries inside the tent included a bed and mattress, table and chairs, even a carpet to spread on the floor.
Pretty cushy, eh? But have you ever traveled through Kansas, Colorado, New Mexico, across the Rio Grande, and deep into Chihuahua, Mexico? Riding in a carriage pulled by a team of mules? I have made that trip – at least as far as the Rio Grande – not in a carriage pulled by mules but in a vehicle equipped with a heater and an air conditioner. I ate my meals in restaurants and spent my evenings in a motel. I made it to the Rio Grande in three days.
My point is that despite servants and all the accouterments Susan possessed, her journey was no cakewalk. And instead of three days, it lasted fifteen months.
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| Susan Shelby Magoffin |
Adding to the drama of the venture was the fact that war had broken out between the United States and Mexico. In fact, the Magoffin caravan traveled west in the wake of the invading American army.
One day after her nineteenth birthday she suffered a miscarriage at Bent’s Fort in southeastern Colorado. From that point on her health forced the Magoffins to spend lengthy stays along the way in order to allow her to recover from various ailments.
Despite the travails of the trail and her illnesses, Susan’s natural curiosity led her to faithfully write in her journal almost every day, in which she described everything: hardships, land and climate, flora and fauna, and people, including the Indians and Mexicans that she encountered.
In addition to her writing about her miscarriage at Bent’s Fort, she had this to say about her stay there:
“There is no place on Earth I believe where man lives and gambling in some form or other is not carried on. Here in the Fort, and who could have supposed such a thing, they have a regularly established billiard room! They have a regular race track. And I hear the cackling of chickens at such a rate some times I shall not be surprised to hear of a cock-pit.”
Her journal ends abruptly due to the fact that she contracted yellow fever in Matamoras, a time in which she gave birth to a son who did not survive.
The Magoffins returned to Kentucky in 1848 and later moved near St. Louis where Samuel purchased a large estate. Susan gave birth to two daughters, but her health further deteriorated and she died in 1855 at age twenty-eight. She is buried in the Bellefontaine Cemetery in St. Louis.
Historians of the western movement will be forever indebted to this bold and adventurous young woman and her colorful journal, originally published in 1926, that provides them with a first person account of life on the Santa Fe Trail.
In commemoration of her journey, a seven-foot high bronze statue of Susan Magoffin holding her journal was unveiled in El Paso, Texas in 2012. At her side is Ring, her faithful dog.
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