Down the Santa Fe Trail and into Mexico

The travel journal of Susan Shelby Magoffin, eighteen years old and a bride of less than eight months, who in 1846 set out with her husband, a veteran Santa Fe trader, on a trek from Independence, Missouri, through New Mexico and south to Chihuahua, describes the fifteen-month journey during which the Mexican War was beginning and New Mexico was occupied by Stephen Watts Kearny and the Army of the West.