Down the Santa Fe Trail and into Mexico: The Diary of Susan Shelby Magoffin, 1846-1847 Book

The book is deemed significant by historians as a type of who's who of the American frontier: in all truth it seems like the story of Susan Shelby Magoffin, "an intelligent, observant, & tolerant person with a genuine inquisitive nature" (xiv) is simply an excuse to showcase the various small biographies of the various men she happened to have met on the trail. Their individual feats and destinies are told through over one hundred footnotes--all of which were not written by the principal author herself--though she is the very backbone to which all the (hi)stories are attached, like lichens unto a structure rife with even worst nuisances: a petite, awful whimsy & full-on girlish pettiness.

The introduction is incorrect in saying that Magoffin had "unusual tolerance." (xxxi) She's taken by the hand & shown only a discrete sample of frontier life by her successful husband, who she adulates every chance she can. The famous opening: "My journal tells a story tonight different from what it has ever done before. The curtain raises now with a new scene" (1) is evidence of what a production, most likely self-imposed, is put forth for the benefit of promoting ancient decrees of femininity. Like a lady, Magoffin blushes in front of the nude natives and has difficulty managing the servants. This woman--all she does--is play house at the frontier. She readies it and compares it to other, lesser, more unfortunate abodes in the neighborhood. She feels bad for not going to a church on the Sabbath day. If you wanted a thrilling tale, something perhaps as captivating as Black Hawk's atrocious account, then this isn't the book, though it does manage to contain a narrative: one devoid a personality other than that of a devoted-to-the-point-of-fanaticism wife ("The life of a wandering princess, mine." [11]) whose limited point of view ("I picked numberless flowers with which the plains are covered, and… I threw them away to gather more"[7]) really prevents the text from becoming a particularly good one.

I was decidedly more intrigued by the side notes which were at times like secret histories: tragedies that befell men shortly after Magoffin met them herself, men like Capt. Warner (killed 3 years later by Indians), and Mr. Robert Spears and J. Stewart (3 months later… "their heads mashed with rocks" [109] by the Navajos). These editorial add-ons were far more shocking than Magoffin's tale.

Even romantic conventions are limited, and rarely thought up, like this astute observation/contemplation: "The Hole in the Rock I found …is quite romantic. It is quite the place in which to build a lovers castle and plant his gardens &c." (76) Dullsville!

Antelopes, corrals, bad weather, oxen, Prairie dogs, buffalo, Mexicans, illnesses, forts, Indians, mirages, "unpalatable" dishes, cigarettes, ruins, housekeeping, men, war, mi alma, mi alma, mi alma… all these appear in the diary, which shows no more than the stunted, stagnant psyche of the mid-19th century American housewife, more than a little racist, & small.