Land Of Enchantment Memoirs Of Marian Russell Along The Santa F Trail

Facsimile edition of one of the few accounts of life on the trail.

Few of the great overland highways of America have known such a wealth of color and romance as that which surrounded the Santa Fé Trail. For over four centuries the dust-gray and muddy-red trail felt the moccasined tread of Comanches, Apaches, Cheyennes, and Arapahoes. These soft footfalls were replaced by the bold harsh clang of the armored conqueror, Coronado, and by a host of Spanish explorers and soldiers seeking the gold of fabled Quivira. Black and brown-robed priests, armed only with the cross, were followed in turn by bearded buckskin-clad fur traders and mountain men, by canny Indian traders, and lean, weather-beaten drovers with great herds of long-horned cattle. [...] The story dictated in such vivid detail by Marian Sloan Russell is a unique and valuable eyewitness account by a sensitive, intelligent girl who grew to maturity on the kaleidoscopic Santa Fé Trail. “Maid Marian,” as she was known by the freighters and soldiers, made five round-trip crossings of the trail before settling down to live her adult life along its deeply rutted traces. —From Foreword “When it was first published in 1954, Marian Russell’s Land of Enchantment was praised as an outstanding memoir of life on the Santa Fe Trail...Now readers everywhere can enjoy Mrs. Russell’s recollections,... And those readers will discover that Mrs. Russell described much more than just life on the Trail. Indeed her memoirs cover virtually every aspect of life in the West...—Southwest Review “These memoirs reveal a strong, energetic woman whose perceptions of old Santa Fe and pioneer life on the trail paint a vivid picture of the nineteenth-century West. The unusual and exact details which Marian Russell recalls make her story enthrallingly real.”—American West

In 1852, seven-year-old Marion Sloan travels with her mother and older brother in a wagon train along the Santa Fe Trail, experiencing both hardship and wonder.

This question-and-answer book contains 400 reminders of what is known and what is sometimes forgotten or misunderstood about a city that was founded more than 400 years ago. Not a traditional history book, this group of questions is presented in an apparently random order, and the answers occasionally meander off topic, as if part of a casual conversation.

Travelers and traders taking the Santa Fe Trail’s routes from Missouri to New Mexico wrote vivid eyewitness accounts of the diverse and abundant wildlife encountered as they crossed arid plains, high desert, and rugged mountains. Most astonishing to these observers were the incredible numbers of animals, many they had not seen before—buffalo, antelope (pronghorn), prairie dogs, roadrunners, mustangs, grizzlies, and others. They also wrote about the domesticated animals they brought with them, including oxen, mules, horses, and dogs. Their letters, diaries, and memoirs open a window onto an animal world on the plains seen by few people other than the Plains Indians who had lived there for thousands of years. Phyllis S. Morgan has gleaned accounts from numerous primary sources and assembled them into a delightfully informative narrative. She has also explored the lives of the various species, and in this book tells about their behaviors and characteristics, the social relations within and between species, their relationships with humans, and their contributions to the environment and humankind. With skillful prose and a keen eye for a priceless tale, Morgan reanimates the story of life on the Santa Fe Trail’s well-worn routes, and its sometimes violent intersection with human life. She provides a stirring view of the land and of the animals visible “as far as the eye could reach,” as more than one memoirist described. She also champions the many contributions animals made to the Trail’s success and to the opening of the American West.

Portrayed by past historians as the greatest guide and Indian fighter in the West, Kit Carson has become in recent years a historical pariah--a brutal murderer who betrayed the Navajos, and an unwitting dupe of American expansion, and a racist. Many historians now question both his reputation and his place in the pantheon of American heroes. Here we are urged to reconsider Carson yet again. Carson was a man of the nineteenth century, whose racial views and actions were much like those of his contemporaries.

On the Santa Fe Trail, a collection of first-hand accounts by nineteenth-century overlanders, offers an intensely personal view of that arduous trip. In retrospect, the history of the Santa Fe Trail—crossing forests, prairies, rivers, and deserts—seems overlayed with the gloss of romance and chivalry. It is set off by heroic attitudes and picturesque adventures. And it has left a deep imprint on one region of the American West. The trail crossed parts of five modern states—Missouri, Kansas, Oklahoma, Colorado, and New Mexico. From the perspective of the overland trade, those five are forever bound in historical communion. The route began in Missouri and ended, after almost a thousand miles, in New Mexico. But it was Kansas that claimed the largest share of the trail: from a beginning point at either Kansas City or Fort Leavenworth it angled across the entire state, exiting over four hundred miles later in the southwestern corner. It would be no exaggeration to say that trade and travel on the Santa Fe Trail derived much of its special flavor from the Kansas experience and that, in turn, the presence of the trail went a long way toward shaping the early history of the state. Many participants in this story, overlanders of various kinds, wrote down what they saw and learned on the way to Santa Fe. It is with that in mind that Marc Simmons has here collected a dozen narratives and reports from the middle years of the trail's history—from the early 1840s to the late '60s—that is, just after New Mexico had passed into American hands. It was a period of intense Indian-white conflict and before the establishment of rail lines along the route. The authors of these narratives—among them several teenagers, a Spanish aristocrat, an Indian agent, a German immigrant lady, a government scout, and a young New Mexican drover of the peon class—qualify as plain folk who, without quite intending to, got swept up in the westering adventure. Simmons has written an introduction to the collection and to each of the narratives.