Santa Fe Trail Resources at the New Mexico State Library: Modern & Historic Travel Accounts

George Champlin Sibley surveyed the Santa Fe Trail under the auspices of the United States government between 1825 and 1827. As he and two other federal commissioners worked their way down the trail, they treated with Indian tribes and mapped the road. Long out of print and now available again, this volume collects portions of the journals, diaries, reports, and letters that record the history of that expedition.

Soon emerging as the survey leader, Sibley was the only commissioner to travel the entire length of the trail from the Missouri frontier to Santa Fe, New Mexico. His journal and diary express the voice of a prosaic dreamer and a practical federal official. Menacing horseflies and unpredictable weather, not Indian war parties, were the greatest cause of complaint by the commissioners.

One of the first Anglo-Americans to record their travels to New Mexico, Dr. Rowland Willard (1794-1884) journeyed west on the Santa Fe Trail in 1825 and then down the Camino Real into Mexico, taking notes along the way. This edition of the young physician's travel diaries and subsequent autobiography, annotated by New Mexico Deputy State Librarian Joy L. Poole, is a rich historical source on the two trails and the practice of medicine in the 1820s. Few Americans knew much about New Mexico when Willard set out on his journey from St. Charles, Missouri, where he had recently completed a medical apprenticeship. The growing commerce with the Southwest presented opportunities for the ambitious doctor. On his first day travelling the plains of the Santa Fe Trail, he met the mountain man Hugh Glass, who regaled Willard with stories of his wilderness experiences. Conducting a physical examination of Glass, Dr. Willard provided the only eye witness medical account of Glass's deformities resulting from a grizzly bear attack. Willard referred to the mountain man as Father Glass, a testimony to his age. He visited Santa Fe, practiced medicine in Taos, then traveled south to Chihuahua, arriving during a measles epidemic. Willard treated patients in Mexico for two years before returning to Missouri in 1828. Willard's narrative challenges long-accepted assumptions about the exact routes taken by pack trains on the Santa Fe Trail. It also provides thrilling glimpses of a landscape densely populated with wildlife. The doctor describes "a great theater of nature," with droves of elk and buffalo, and "wolf and antelope skipping in every direction." With his traveling companions he hunted buffalo by crawling after them on all fours, afterward making jerky out of bison meat and boats out of their hides. Willard also details his medical practice, offering a revealing view of physicians' operating practices in a time when sanitation and anesthesia were rare. The Santa Fe Trail and Camino Real took Willard on the journey of a lifetime. This account recalls the early days of the Santa Fe Trail trade and westward American migration, when a doctor from Missouri could cross paths with mountain men, traders, Mexican clergymen, and government officials on their way to new opportunities.

The Santa Fe Trail extended from the American settlements in westernmost Missouri to the Mexican town of Santa Fe in present-day New Mexico. Its path followed some of the wildest, most desolate yet beautiful country in America.A spirited and graphic account of life along the Santa Fe Trail, this book includes the history of the land before the famous trail, the lure of Santa Fe, the dangers of surveying and traveling, the cattle drives and the people who trailed west, the Indians, the army, the women, the railroad, and the freighters during its long and useful l

"Susan Magoffin was long believed to be the first American white woman to travel the [Santa Fe] trail. But Santa Fe historian Marian Meyer discovered in 1987 that Susan had been preceded by a trader's wife 13 years earlier. 'Mary Donoho, 25 years old, arrived in Santa Fe in 1833, with her husband William and a nine-month-old daughter,' Marian said. 'They were with a party of 150 Missourians and great wagon train of freight...'" -From The National Geographic, March 1991 Marian Meyer has written the story of Mary Donoho who was the first woman to survive the rugged and grueling crossing of the Santa Fe Trail in 1833. Mary Donoho, "the new first lady of the Santa Fe Trail" was a woman of uncommon substance who lived in Santa Fe until the 1837 Perez Rebellion and then moved with her husband to Clarksville, Texas. After the death of her husband, Mrs. Donoho ran the 'legendary' Donoho Hotel in Clarksville, Texas, and raised her six children. Mary Donoho's life lives up to the image of the undaunted pioneer woman of the past.

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.

In 1852, Rebecca Cohen Mayer, a newly-married, 15-year old, Jewish girl,embarked on a journey across the Santa Fe Trail. Although Rebecca'shusband, Henry Mayer, had made the trip many times, few women traveledthis journey, and perhaps no other female traveled across the Santa FeTrail without female companions. Yet, Rebecca was the lone woman on awagon train with 50 drivers, plus her husband, a cook and bookkeeper.Rebecca's story is based partly on her own journal. Filled withexcitement, wonder and tragedy, Rebecca's story relates the amazingadventure of an American Jewish woman.

In 1839 a journalist for the New Orleans Picayune, Matthew C. Field, joined a company of merchants and tourists headed west on the Santa Fe Trail. Leaving Independence, Missouri, early in July "with a few wagons and a carefree spirit," Field recorded his vivid impressions of travel westward on the Santa Fe Trail and, on the return trip, eastward along the Cimarron Route. Written in verse in his journal and in eighty-five articles later published in the Picayune, Field’s observations offer the modern reader a unique glimpse of life in the settlements of Mexico and on the Santa Fe Trail.

In 1821 William Becknell and five comrades traveled from Franklin, Missouri to Santa Fe, New Mexico, then the northern provincial capital of New Spain, the first Americans to do so legally. And thus was born the Santa Fe Trail, a nine hundred mile long road of commerce to a foreign land. During New Spain's reign, foreign trade had been forbidden, but that changed when Mexico wrested control from the European empire in 1821. Never an active immigrant highway, selling merchandise to goods-starved Mexican residents and returning revenue to economically starved Missouri was the Trail's primary purpose. During the formative years but one town, San Miguel del Vado, forty miles east of Santa Fe, existed along the Trail. By the mid-1840s Mexican merchants were dominant, and their children were sent to American schools. The Mexican-American war erupted in 1846, and Brigadier General Stephen Kearny led the Army of the West into battle along the Trail. The victorious United States acquired much of the southwest, from Texas to California. This changed the nature of the Trail when the many military forts that were built to secure the peace required provisions. During this period the trailhead gradually moved west as the railroad chugged in. In 1880 the railroad reached Lamy, New Mexico, twenty miles south of Santa Fe, and there the Trail died. The present work leads the reader along the Trail, describing specific sites and the nature of the area surrounding each, and the author's experiences visiting them.