page_title: Susan Shelby Magoffin
section_title: Across the plains
hierarchical_section_title: Susan Shelby Magoffin / Journal / Across the plains
caption_attribution_description: English: 1845 Santa Fe Trail
context_page_description: Susan Shelby Magoffin was the wife of a trader from the United States who traveled on the Santa Fe Trail in the late 1840s.
  The diary in which she recorded her experiences has been used extensively as a source for histories of the time.
context_section_description: The journey took the Magoffins due west from St. Louis, Missouri, across the prairies of what is now Kansas, where she observed many migrating buffaloes.
  She recorded, "Such soup as we have made of the hump ribs, one of the most choice parts of the buffalo. I never eat its equal in the best hotels of N.Y. and Philadᵃ. And the sweetest butter and most delicate oil I ever tasted tis not surpassed by the marrow taken from the thigh bones." 
  By 13 July some of the novelty had worn off.  She wrote, "Passed a great many buffalo, (some thousands) they crossed our road frequently within two or three hundred yards.
  They are very ugly, ill-shapen things with their long shaggy hair over their heads, and the great hump on their backs, and they look so droll running."
  She witnessed a burial on the plains, and was impressed by the great pains taken to protect the body from wolves with a deep grave covered in stones and the earth tamped down by cattle.  
  Their carriage rolled over on 4 July, and on the 21st their tent collapsed in a violent storm.
caption: Sante Fe Trail
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