Blazing the path: 'Crossings' goes into the history of 'Women on the Santa Fe Trail'

Susan Shelby Magoffin is probably the most well-known woman to have traveled the Santa Fe Trail. Well-known because of the diary she kept during the journey was later published. She traveled with her husband-trader Samuel Magoffin and her enslaved Black servant, known only by her first name, Jane.

They joined a caravan on the route in Independence, Missouri, and arrived in Santa Fe in the summer of 1846. Their arrival was within weeks of the Army of the West seizing New Mexico, then part of Mexico, as a U.S. possession.

Blazing the path: 'Crossings' goes into the history of 'Women on the Santa Fe Trail'

Magoffin is but one of the women in Frances Levine’s revealing new book, “Crossings: Women on the Santa Fe Trail.”

Some of the females named in the book traveled the trail from west to east.

The trail was in existence from 1821 to about the mid-1870s, when railroads began to dominate transcontinental traffic west from St. Louis.

One woman profiled in the book, long before there was a Santa Fe Trail, is María Rosa Villalpando of Ranchos de Taos. One might think of Villalpando’s story as a preamble of the roles women of different cultures would play in the historic trail’s commercial and cross-cultural relevance.

Levine writes that Villalpando was among the women Comanches captured in a 1760 raid of the Villalpando compound. The Comanche attack was apparently a response to a dance ceremony held at nearby Taos Pueblo that allegedly used Comanche scalps.

In the winter of 1761 Comanches brought seven captives back to Taos as a peace offering because the Comanches wanted to resume taking part in the Taos trade fair, Levine writes. The Spanish governor refused the offering because all of the captives, including María Rosa, were not included.

Officials in St. Louis later received reports of a “Spanish woman” — presumably María Rosa — enslaved by the Comanches eight years before, had a son with a Comanche. The two were sold to the Pawnee and were resold to a French trader, Jean Baptiste Salé dit Lajoie.

Lajoie and María Rosa married in St. Louis, and they had a son. She never returned to New Mexico. She did, however, become an active and respected member of the French Creole community in St. Louis.

Carmel Benavides was another Hispanic woman who married a French Creole trader but under different circumstances. Benavides, of a prominent Santa Fe family, married Antoine Robidoux. Benavides traveled the Santa Fe Trail many times, sometimes without her husband, Levine writes.

Robidoux’s trader-brothers also married Hispanic women.

Levine discusses three young girls who separately traveled the trail:

• Adaline “Prairie Flower” Carson, the half-Arapaho daughter of Kit Carson, crossed from Bent’s Fort, Colorado, to Missouri and back to the West in the mid-19th century. Her life is part of Levine’s exploration of the larger issue of the place of children of mixed descent fitting into communities “during the westward expansion and Native subjugation.”
• Marian Sloan Russell’s memoir records that she had made her first trip on the trail in the spring of 1852 at age 7. She would repeat the trip four times as a child and again when she married a soldier stationed at Fort Union in New Mexico, Levine writes. (That same spring, the first schoolteachers from the Sisters of Loretto in Kentucky traveled the trail to New Mexico.)
• Francisca López de Kimball’s father brought her from New Mexico to Missouri after her mother’s death in 1848. Her marriage and her command of English helped her rise in prominence in St. Louis society, Levine writes.

There’s also the story of Kate Kingsbury. Kingsbury was living in Salem, Massachusetts, and suffering from tuberculosis. She was headed to New Mexico in hopes of recovering. She didn’t make it; she died on the Santa Fe Trail in June 1857.

A Euro American woman who took the trail for a different reason was Julia Anna Archibald Holmes. Her motivation was adventure.

She wore bloomers — long pants under a skirt — so she could climb Pike’s Peak. She did. Holmes’ bloomers made a political statement: They were, Levine writes, “a sign of her allegiance to suffrage and her belief in the rights of women and freedom for the enslaved.”

The author says an argument could be made that the eastern terminus of the Santa Fe Trail should actually be at St. Louis, rather than Independence or St. Joseph, Missouri.

St. Louis, a commercial hub at the confluence of the Mississippi and Missouri rivers, is where many goods were warehoused and wagons were manufactured for journeys on the Santa Fe Trail.

One chapter of the book is devoted to African American women on the trail.

Levine, a St. Louis resident, was president of the Missouri Historical Society from April 2014 to July 2022. From 2002 to 2014 she had been the director of the New Mexico History Museum and the Palace of the Governors in Santa Fe.