Down the Santa Fe Trail and into Mexico: The Diary of Susan Shelby Magoffin, 1846-1847 (Yale Western Americana Paperbound, Yw-3.)

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Summary: Primary Source tale of a honeymoon on the Santa Fe Trail
Review: Magoffin was a name familiar to the Mexicans who had trading relations with Susan's husband for years before he married her and took her with him from the states on an expedition to Chihuahua, Mexico. She kept a diary from which she drew her information for the only book I know written by a woman, young and pregnant, whose fate it was to die in her 26th year, at home. Accounts from her perspective at such a crucial time in relations between the United States and Mexico, in a venacular peculiarly her own, make her work one of considerable importance to the serious student of the time. Revealing also are individual encounters with men, some from her own country, and her opinion of Gen. Stephen Watts Kearny, commander of the U.S. Army of the West stationed in Sante Fe. Susan was a young lady of class the exercise of which makes the reader proud, and whose elegance charmed all who came to know her.