Description

Some of the first women to travel across present day Kansas were travelers on the Santa Fe Trail. This presentation looks at the adventures and reflections of four of these remarkable women who wrote their own stories. Susan Shelby Magoffin traveled with her husband’s wagon train in 1846, while Katie Bowen traveled the trail in 1851. From the age of 7 to 17, Marion Sloan Russell traveled the Santa Fe Trail five times with her single mother. Perhaps the most famous of this group, however, was suffragist and abolitionist Julia Archibald Holmes who wrote letters as she traveled the Santa Fe Trail across Kansas Territory to the Rocky Mountains, where she became the first woman to climb Pikes Peak. Presented by Presented by Leo E. Oliva. Leo is a historian with a research focus on 19th-century Kansas.