What compelled you to write this book?
There were so many points of entry for me to study the women of the Santa Fe Trail. I have lived along the Santa Fe Trail and have been the chief executive of museums in Santa Fe and St. Louis that hold important artifact, archival, and photographic collections relating to the history of the Santa Fe Trail. In my early professional life as an archaeologist, I excavated sites with ceramics that marked the change in goods the trail brought to New Mexico. Then as a museum professional, I got the chance to work with the artifacts and documents that chronicled the life of so many men who came across the trail as merchants or military men.
There were fewer donations marking women’s lives and experiences on the trail. Yet we knew they were there from the few published diaries and memoirs—like Marian Sloan Russell’s and Susan Shelby Magoffin’s. That inspired me to look for more women’s experiences. The materials I found in St. Louis were so rich and so deep. There was no way I could not write the book.
Information wasn’t easy to find. What are some of the research tricks you employed?
I often found women mentioned in the footnotes or official records of different caravans as the wives of men in the caravan. That gave me the starting point to find them in other records. Commercial and store ledgers and census records were especially useful. Several of the women I wrote about had published their own memoirs or diaries.
Tell us about some of the women who particularly touched your heart.
The story of María Rosa Villalpando, captured by Comanches in a raid on Ranchos de Taos in August 1760. She’s an amazing woman who demonstrated almost unimaginable resilience. She was traded to the Pawnees, then bought by one of the original French settlers of St. Louis. She lived in St. Louis, near where the Gateway Arch now stands, until she was over 100. Her story continues to hold me.
Suffragist and abolitionist Julia Anna Archibald Holmes was known through so many sources for two things: climbing Pikes Peak in Colorado and wearing the American Reform outfit, or “bloomers,” on the trail. Her real importance to New Mexico was the work she did as an activist opposing the 1859 Slavery Code proposed by the Territorial Legislature.
Francisca López de Kimball nearly broke my heart as I read the letters she wrote to her father. After the death of his wife, he placed his three young children in boarding schools in Missouri in 1850. As Kimball became proficient in English, she wrote sweet letters to him about her life there. Sadly, he may not have received the letter she wrote in April 1852, as he died on the trail moving sheep from New Mexico to the California goldfields.
Why does it matter that we know about these people?
When I moved from Santa Fe to St. Louis in 2014, I began to see the trail in a very different way: not just for the material and demographic changes it introduced to New Mexico, but for its strategic importance in the advance of the Western United States frontier. I also began to understand how significantly the French cultural associations were between Missouri and New Mexico. The traders were not simply Americans; many of the traders were themselves new Americans from French colonial settlements on the Mississippi. This fact had escaped me when looking at the trail from New Mexico alone.
There are books about the Santa Fe Trail that deal with specific women’s travels, but none that place the women in the larger history of the West. I don’t think you can tell the story of the West without considering the women who were there on the trail and making communities in the West.
How did life for women change during those eras?
Women held some very specific rights under Spanish governance. They retained their family names, and that gave them a larger sense of community and belonging. That part of their life story was not lost to history through assuming their husband’s name. More importantly, women under Spanish law had title to property they owned before marriage or acquired through inheritance. This gave them some degree of independence and a source of their own wealth. All that was lost when U.S. law converted the wives’ property to community property or subject to their husbands’ control.
What was your greatest frustration?
I made a distinct decision not to write another work about Susan Shelby Magoffin, but instead to look at the relationship she had with her enslaved servant Jane. But I could never find out anything about where Jane was born, what her full name was, how she felt about being on the trail, and what ultimately happened to her. Did the Magoffins sell her to someone in New Mexico or somewhere else on their return to Missouri?
How many old Western movies about the Santa Fe Trail did you watch—and were any of them worth the effort?
I’m always ready for a good love story set on the trail. Santa Fe Trail is a 1940 movie with Errol Flynn, Olivia de Havilland, Ronald Reagan, and so many other actors. It’s entertaining, until they break into musical numbers that date the piece badly.
I think Crossings has a number of stories that would make terrific films. Just saying … I’m available for script consulting.