June 11, 1846: ''Now the prairie life begins...'' And thus begins the story of America's first white woman to travel the Santa Fe Trail from Independence, Missouri, to Chihuahua, Mexico--a distance of 1,300 miles. Susan Shelby Magoffin and her well-to-do husband, Samuel, 27 years her senior, experience one trial after another. But the blood of pioneers is in their veins and neither wolves nor Indians, the Mexican War nor the loss of their first child will stop the wheels of their wagons. Based on the trail journal of the heroine, Bride of the Santa Fe Trail is Jean M. Burroughs' salute to the courage and greatness of a little-known figure in American history. It is not the story of the little woman behind the big man--but quite the reverse. In the end her battered Rockaway carriage becomes a symbol of a landscape almost too bleak for human habitation: ''...its wheels patched and mended, its broken top reinforced with assorted studs of used lumber...its shiny black paint dulled by wind-driven sand...'' Truly the narrative of a first-woman, a first-voyage which, in the words of Jean M. Burroughs becomes, like the battered Rockaway carriage, a trip into the deep space of our ancestors' time.

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