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Down the Santa Fe Trail and Into Mexico
In June 1846 Susan Shelby Magoffin, eighteen years old and a bride of less than eight months, set out with her husband, a veteran Santa Fe trader, on a trek from Independence, Missouri, through New Mexico and south to Chihuahua. Her travel journal was written at a crucial time, when the Mexican War was beginning and New Mexico was occupied by Stephen Watts Kearny and the Army of the West. Her journal describes the excitement, routine, and dangers of a successful merchant's wife. On the trail for fifteen months, moving from house to house and town to town, she became adept in Spanish and the lingo of traders, and wrote down in detail the customs and appearances of places she went. She gave birth to her first child during the journey and admitted, "This thing of marrying is not what it is cracked up to be." Valuable as a social and historical record of her encounters—she met Zachary Taylor and was agreeably disappointed to find him disheveled but kindly—her journal is equally important as a chronicle of her growing intelligence, experience, and strength, her lost illusions and her coming to terms with herself.
The Discovery of the Oregon Trail
Robert Stuart saw the American West a few years after Meriwether Lewis and William Clark and, like them, kept a journal of his epic experience. A partner in John Jacob Astor’s Pacific Fur Company, the Scotsman shipped for Oregon aboard the Tonquin in 1810 and helped found the ill-fated settlement of Astoria at the mouth of the Columbia River. In 1812, facing disaster, Stuart and six others slipped away from Astoria and headed east. His journal, edited and annotated by Philip Ashton Rollins, describes their hazardous 3,700-mile journey to St. Louis. Crossing the Rockies in winter, they faced death by cold, starvation, and hostile Indians. But they made history by discovering what came to be called the Oregon Trail, including South Pass, over which thousands of emigrants would travel west in mid-century. Besides Stuart’s narrative, this volume contains important material about Astoria and the fate of the Tonquin, as well as the harrowing account of Wilson Price Hunt, who headed a party of overlanders traveling east to join the Astorians.
Twenty Thousand Roads
"Virginia Scharff's wonderfully readable account of women in motion complicates and enriches our understanding of the nineteenth and twentieth century Wests. Her gendered remapping of the regional landscape explodes traditional notions of western movement. All students of women and gender, travel and place, the West and America, would do well to read this excellent book."--David M. Wrobel, author of Promised Lands: Promotion, Memory, and the Creation of the American West "Virginia Scharff claims for women what has long been central to the masculine mythology of the West--free movement and its many gifts, real and imagined. Her book is as exhilarating and as intellectually and emotionally exp...
The Chouteaus
In the late eighteenth century, the vast, pristine land that lay west of the Mississippi River remained largely unknown to the outside world. The area beckoned to daring frontiersmen who produced the first major industry of the American West--the colorful but challenging, often dangerous fur trade. At the lead was an enterprising French Creole family that founded the city of St. Louis in 1763 and pushed forth to garner furs for world markets. Stan Hoig provides an intimate look into the lives of four generations of the Chouteau family as they voyaged up the Western rivers to conduct trade, at times taking wives among the native tribes. They provided valuable aid to the Lewis and Clark expedition and assisted government officials in developing Indian treaties. National leaders, tribal heads, and men of frontier fame sought their counsel. In establishing their network of trading posts and opening trade routes throughout the Central Plains and Rocky Mountains, the Chouteaus contributed enormously to the nation's westward movement.
As Far as the Eye Could Reach
Travelers and traders taking the Santa Fe Trail’s routes from Missouri to New Mexico wrote vivid eyewitness accounts of the diverse and abundant wildlife encountered as they crossed arid plains, high desert, and rugged mountains. Most astonishing to these observers were the incredible numbers of animals, many they had not seen before—buffalo, antelope (pronghorn), prairie dogs, roadrunners, mustangs, grizzlies, and others. They also wrote about the domesticated animals they brought with them, including oxen, mules, horses, and dogs. Their letters, diaries, and memoirs open a window onto an animal world on the plains seen by few people other than the Plains Indians who had lived there for...
Women of the New Mexico Frontier, 1846-1912
Biographies of and a collection of writings by women who, for various reasons, found themselves living in New Mexico Territory, from the mid-nineteenth century to the beginning of World War I.
Crossroads of Change
Encompassing nearly seven thousand acres amid the woodlands of the Sangre de Cristo Mountains in northern New Mexico, the land that is now Pecos National Historical Park has witnessed thousands of years of cultural history stretching back to the Native peoples who long ago inhabited the pueblos of Pecos, then known as Cicuye. Once a trading center where Pueblo Indians, Spanish soldiers and settlers, and Plains Indians encountered one another, not always peacefully, Pecos was a stop on the Santa Fe Trail in the early 1800s and, later, on the first railroad in New Mexico. It was the site of a critical Civil War battle and in the twentieth century became a tourist destination. This book tells t...
Catalog of Copyright Entries. Third Series
Includes Part 1, Number 1: Books and Pamphlets, Including Serials and Contributions to Periodicals (January - June)
Jedediah Smith and the Opening of the West
In 1822, before Jedediah Smith entered the West, it was largely an unknown land, “a wilderness,” he wrote, “of two thousand miles diameter.” During his nine years as a trapper for Ashley and Henry and later for the Rocky Mountain Fur Company, “the mild and Christian young man” blazed the trail westward through South Pass; he was the first to go from the Missouri overland to California, the first to cross the length of Utah and the width of Nevada, first to travel by land up through California and Oregon, first to cross the Sierra Nevada. Before his death on the Santa Fe Trail at the hands of the Comanches, Jed Smith and his partners had drawn the map of the west on a beaver skin.
