All the stars in the sky: the Santa Fe trail diary of Florrie Mack Ryder

by Megan McDonald

  After a week or more of waiting, Mama became more and more attached to the baby. But so did she fear for my own well-being and Jem's, and felt a terrible need to push on to Santa Fe. Round about that time, one of the men in Mr. Ryder's party found the bodies of a man, a woman, and two boy children. Not a one of them could understand what in the world a lone family was doing there. It looked like the cholera or some such had taken them, and next to the mother there appeared to be a basket with a blanket for holding a baby.

  Mr. Ryder and the men were then delayed giving the family a proper burial, even though it be a grave with no names.

  Mama felt for sure and certain it had to be God's will, her finding the baby after losing her own, and that wee thing without a family. She saw it as a sign, a

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  gift from God, a chance to give that baby a hope in this world.

  On account of where they found her, and because she was a wild thing, they named her Cimarron. Unbroken.

  I look at those sweet fat hands and those teeny perfect toes and think there's nothing broke about her. It's all new, and she has the world up ahead of her in this land of enchantment. Land of Tomorrow.

  November 11

  Mama has brought me a bottle of perfume! A lovely blue glass bottle with a holder at the top that looks crystal-like. I am happier with the bottle than I am with the perfume inside. But most of all I'm happy Mama sees me as grown-up enough to have my own perfume, called The Rose of Youth.

  So taken with my perfume that I didn't get to see what Mama had for Jem. Must ask him. Jem was most eager to present his spoons to Mama and Mr. Ryder. Mama cried at the sight of them, and Mr. Ryder said The Four Spoons would make a perfect name for this house, to be carved in wood over the door.

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  Then we all did remember it will have to be The Five Spoons.

  Mr. Ryder has brought me an even bigger surprise -- an abalone shell from Mo'e'ha! And .. . my own bed, soft and warm and made of feathers! "Nothing too good for my oldest daughter," he did say with a knowing look.

  November 12

  I know where to plant the cottonwood seeds now. Outside the window, where Cimarron sleeps. One day it will grow up to wave hands of fairy green at her.

  November 17

  One whole entire week has passed in a blink.

  Today I stepped on a burr, which hurt something fierce, so I went down to the stream to dangle my feet in the water. I was staring at the same ten toes I've always had, but I couldn't help thinking of where all they'd been and the things they'd made it through. Aunt Florence was right: The trail may be over, but I am on a path different from whence I started.

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  Evening

  Ate with Jem's spoons at supper tonight. We dipped our spoons way down into the honey jar and savored the very last of Aunt F's honey. Everybody agreed the end is sweetest.

  Just when it seemed we must be all out of stories, we started recounting ones we'd already heard. Telling tales takes us back to the Missouri town with the scar in the rock we came from, or ahead to dreaming on the future.

  Hopes for the future for Florrie M. Ryder:

  Go to school

  Finish quilt with three patches for Santa Fe (Five

  Spoons, the church, and a cottonwood tree) Receive letter from the Nuttings Teach baby Cimarron names of flowers and birds Climb a mountain someday See that Jem does not eat all my licorice strings

  End of November

  We're a real family now. Like a bone that's been broken and mended back stronger than ever. It's not like

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  the place in us for Papa and baby Missouri is gone. It's just we're making room for the ones we have left to love on this earth.

  Every night now I sing Cimarron to sleep with a New Mexican lullaby that I have heard Lupe sing to Rosalita:

  Sleep my beautiful baby Sleep my grain of gold

  I often sip tea and read to Mama, and when I feel warm and sleepy inside, I crawl under a thick quilt, thinking my thoughts by the light of the moon. I'm surrounded by my own drawings, and Mr. St. Clair's, pinned to the wall. At last I fall to sleep on the new bed, the feather bed Mr. Ryder brought for me all the way from somewhere.

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  Epilogue

  On August 21, 1849, Bent's Fort burned to the ground.

  It wasn't long before Florrie and her family received sad word of it in Santa Fe. Florrie remembered fondly her time there, and the friends she had hoped to see again one day. She would never again see a magpie or dance the Cuna without thinking of Mo'e'ha and Manny.

  In 1858, at the ripe old age of twenty-two, Florrie married a hardworking, song-loving man named Ricardo Jose Alma. A ranchero living outside of Santa Fe, he made many a trip to get supplies at the Santa Fe General Store, where they fell in love over a newly soaped-up saddle.

  That same year, gold was discovered at Cherry Creek. Never forgetting Muldoon's colorful tales of the Colorado region, Florrie and her husband struck out for gold country, where Florrie would become

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  known for being one of the first women to hike to the top of Pikes Peak.

  With Ricardo, she stood at the top of that mountain and read to him from her book of Ralph Waldo Emerson's essays. "Every promise of the soul has innumerable fulfilments." Then and there, she and Ricardo decided to settle on a ranch in those very foothills, near present-day Colorado Springs. They went on to have five children.

  Jem never did make it to California to find the end of the rainbow. His fortune led him instead to the Colorado gold fields along with Florrie, where he worked as a carpenter, hoping to strike it rich. His plans were interrupted by the outbreak of the Civil War. In 1861, he enlisted with Company A of the Second Colorado Infantry, where he was sent on a difficult winter march back to Santa Fe to defend against Confederate attack. Following in his own papa's footsteps, he worked as medic at a makeshift hospital near Pigeon's Ranch during the difficult battles of Glorieta Pass, the Gettysburg of the West. Here he met his future wife, Ellen, a Civil War laundress and nurse.

  Florrie was to cross paths again with her dear friends Louisa and Eliza Nutting, whose family had settled near San Francisco, California. Eliza returned

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  to Santa Fe as a teacher, in 1857, where she taught reading and writing at a school for girls established by Bishop Lamy and the Sisters of Loretta. There she was known for her lively storytelling. She always spun a good yarn or two while her students engaged in beadwork and sewing. She kept in her classroom a red leather autograph book where each of her students would write a verse every year. Her favorite was that of one of her brightest young students, none other than Cimarron Ryder.

  One day on an outing to Denver, Florrie happened to pass by the local concert hall, where a playbill unexpectedly caught her eye. Louisa Nutting Edwards! That night, she attended a violin concert, given by her long-ago friend. Though Louisa now had a shiny new Hopf violin in a case lined with silk, she still wrapped around her beloved instrument an old patchwork given to her by Florrie as a parting gift at Cimarron Crossing.

  After her children were grown, Florrie published a book of her sketches called Scenes from the Santa Fe Trail, dedicated to Mr. St. Clair. She died at her home in Colorado Springs at the age of seventy.

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  Life in America in 1848

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  Historical Note

  In the 1800s, Americans were moving west. The Oregon Trail, the Mormon Trail, the California Trail -- all carried emigrants and adventurers across mud-red trails and rocky dust-gray roads through harsh conditions to new lands, new homes, new fortunes, new lives.

  The Santa Fe Trail was different. Primarily a trade route, it saw few emigrant families and settlers, and even fewer women. Rather, it carried traders -- wagon caravans loaded with goods for sale and barter, following the "immense highway" first blazed by the hooves of a million thundering buffalo.

  Traders, eager to fetch high prices for their goods, headed for S
anta Fe. However, the Mexican Territory was under Spanish rule, and they didn't look kindly on outsiders, often jailing American traders.

  In 1821, as Missouri became a state and Mexico won its independence from Spain, William Becknell and four companions loaded trade items onto the backs of a few pack animals, and headed for Santa Fe.

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  They quickly sold everything and brought back not only bags jangling with coins, but word from the new governor that American traders were now welcome in Mexican territory.

  Becknell returned to Santa Fe that same year with $3,000 worth of trade goods piled into heavy wagons. He blazed a shortcut trail, the Cimarron Cutoff, saving one hundred miles and avoiding steep mountain passes. Despite the difficult journey, including a long, waterless stretch of desert, he made it, along with a 2,000 percent profit!

  Soon American traders, mostly men, began setting off from Arrow Rock, and pouring into Santa Fe. Their wagons, pulled by mules or oxen, were overloaded with fabrics, ladies' dress patterns, buttons, buckles, and all kinds of clothing and household goods. By 1827, steamboats brought St. Louis goods all the way up the Missouri River to Independence, Missouri. Here the wagons loaded up, taking nearly two months to make the eight hundred-mile journey.

  Often wagons would set off in groups for safety, and at Council Grove they might join with additional wagon trains, forming circles to keep livestock safely inside. Travelers faced countless dangers: blazing heat, thirst, hunger, thunderstorms, lightning, disease,

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  prairie fires, buffalo stampedes, Indian attacks, rattlesnakes, swarms of mosquitoes, and hazardous river crossings, to name a few.

  By the mid-1840s, only a few American women had traveled the Santa Fe Trail.

  In 1846, Susan Magoffin, age eighteen, pregnant, and a new bride, set out from Missouri with her husband, Samuel Magoffin, a trader in charge of a large wagon train. One of the earliest women to travel the trail, Susan fed animals and picked berries, cooked meals, sewed, wrote in her diary, and made notes of all the wild-flowers, animals, and sights along the way to Santa Fe.

  Her trip was historically significant for a number of reasons, not the least of which is that her journal provided an accurate daily record of trail life and happenings, from a woman's point of view. She chronicles the food, dress, habits, routine, and social customs of an ordinary day on the trail, as well as the meeting of cultures at Bent's Fort and provides a record of Santa Fe trade in its heyday, a detailing of Mexican and Cheyenne life and customs, and an account of the Mexican War.

  As recorded by Magoffin, Bent's Old Fort was a welcomed sight along the Mountain Branch of the Santa Fe Trail. It stood at the crossroads, a lively trading post where Indians, mountain men, fur trappers,

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  and traders alike gathered to trade goods and stories. Many sought to rest livestock, repair wagons, gamble, sing, dance, or fill their bellies. Like a small, bustling city with adobe walls, it contained a trade room, council room, kitchen, blacksmith shop, living quarters, as well as a billiard room, a belfry that housed two eagles, and an assortment of pet peacocks.

  Cheyenne, Arapaho, Comanche, Kiowa, Apache, Sioux, and Pawnee frequented the fort to trade. The Bents were known as the fairest traders around. They built the fort on lands of the Southern Cheyennes and worked diligently to keep good relationships with the Native Americans, even encouraging rival groups to keep the peace, which was always better for business.

  Peace did not reign forever, though. In 1847, one of the Bent brothers, Charles, was murdered in an uprising in Taos. A few years later, another partner, Ceran St. Vrain, withdrew his support. Cholera swept the plains and killed half of the Southern Cheyennes. Bent's Fort, so famed for its trade with the Indians, could no longer support itself. In 1849, the fort was blown up under mysterious circumstances.

  Despite the demise of Bent's Old Fort, trade continued to flourish on the Santa Fe Trail, and New Mexico soon became a U.S. territory. This opened up

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  the region to even more traders, and travel along the Santa Fe Trail increased quickly. By the 1850s, many American traders were settling in New Mexico. This meant the trail began to see more women, along with families and children.

  In addition to the wives of traders, merchants, missionaries, and a few families on their way to California, the trail also saw nuns traveling southwest, the wives of military officers, and -- the largest group of women to brave the Santa Fe Trail as far as Bent's Fort -- were those accompanying gold seekers who rushed to the Pikes Peak region of Colorado in 1858 and 1859.

  Travel along the trail peaked in 1866. That year alone, upward of five thousand wagons made the trek west from Missouri. The trail was now dotted with army forts to protect traders and transport army supplies. It also served as a mail route and stagecoach line. Alive as it was, its demise was quick to follow, with railroads having reached Kansas by 1867. Traders began to ride the rails as far as they could go, closer and closer to Santa Fe. In February 1880, the first train rolled into Santa Fe, which marked not only the closing of a trail but the end of an era. A few grass-filled ruts, poking up through patches of prairie after these many years, still tell the story.

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  Travelers on the Santa Fe Trail stop along the way to eat lunch and mend broken wagons.

  Bent's Fort stood at the crossroads of the Santa Fe Trail. A trading post for trappers, mountain men, Native Americans, and traders, travelers along the trail stopped for supplies, food, rest, and wagon repairs.

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  As Bent's Fort was built on Cheyenne land, Cheyenne people frequented the fort to trade, work, and visit. The Cheyenne, originally part of the Algonquin nation, were hunters and fishers in North Dakota. Fighting with other Native American peoples, however, led to their migration westward, until they settled in Colorado.

  Its large size and its proximity to the edge of the Great Plains made Pikes Peak the first major landmark of wagon trains passing into the mountainous part of the Santa Fe Trail.

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  Traders who followed the Santa Fe Trail are greeted by La Fonda, an inn located in Santa Fe's central plaza, where the trail ends.

  The Catholic Church of San Miguel, built in the early 1600s, is the oldest church in Santa Fe, and, some say, in the entire United States.

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  Native Americans, New Mexicans, and businessmen who came to Santa Fe from back East mingle in the town's central plaza, shopping and bartering.

  Map of the United States, showing Arrow Rock, Missouri; Bent's Fort; and Santa Fe, New Mexico.

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  About the Author

  When I was in college, I dreamed of spending a summer in the Rocky Mountains, so I got myself a job as a park ranger for the National Park Service. When I stepped off the train in Colorado, however, I found myself in the desert, not the mountains: Bent's Old Fort National Historic Site in La Junta, Colorado.

  Stepping foot inside this adobe castle began my love of history. With the ringing of the blacksmith's hammer, the smell of adobe bricks baking in the sun, and bright strings of red peppers hanging from the cottonwood rafters, I was immediately transported to another time, another culture, and a completely different way of life.

  I spent the summer engaged in living history at the fort. My on-the-job training was to build a fire using only flint and steel, eat tripe stew and drink out of a

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  tin cup, fire a flintlock musket, and sleep out under the stars, wrapped in a buffalo hide.

  At the fort, I impersonated Charlotte Green, the fort's cook, where I learned how to make tortillas and johnnycakes, jerk meat for pemmican, roast coffee beans in a skillet, and bake Charlotte's famous pumpkin pies in an adobe oven.

  It was here that I first came across Susan Magoffin's diary of her remarkable journey as one of the first women to traverse the Santa Fe Trail. I have never forgotten her story. This, and a notebook I kept of my own "first-hand" experiences and observations at the fort, inspi
red Florrie's diary, right down to the tallow candle races and the sifting of dirt and dust in search of whitehearts, those precious red beads with the white centers.

  Megan McDonald is the author of the acclaimed Beezy books, the Judy Moody stories and Shadows in the Glasshouse. She lives with her husband in Sebastopol, California, with two dogs, two adopted horses, and fifteen wild turkeys that like to hang out on their back porch.

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  Acknowledgments

  Many, many thanks go to historian (and sister) Melissa McDonald; expert librarian and reader Carol Edwards; Mary Ellen Grant of Olathe, Kansas; Bent's Old Fort National Historic Site in La Junta, Colorado; the Santa Fe Trail Center, Larned, Kansas; Nancy Brown at the Center for Southwest Research, Zimmerman Library, Albuquerque, New Mexico; the Kansas State Historical Society; the Governor Bent House and Museum, Taos, New Mexico; the Kit Carson Home and Museum, Taos, New Mexico. I'm also indebted to historian Marc Simmons's seminal research on women of the Santa Fe Trail.

  Grateful acknowledgment is made for permission to reprint the following:

  Cover Portrait: At the Start of the Day, by Adolphe William Bouguereau, Courtesy of Christie's London © Christie's Images/SuperStock. Cover Background: Culver Pictures.

  Page 182 (top): Travelers on the Santa Fe Trail, SuperStock.

  Page 182 (bottom): Bent's Fort, courtesy of Richard Frajola, Ranchos de

  Taos, New Mexico. Page 183 (top): Cheyenne men, Smithsonian (B. A. E.), courtesy of the

  Kansas State Historical Society, Topeka. Page 183 (bottom): Pikes Peak, Courtesy of the Kansas State Historical

  Society, Topeka.

  Page 184 (top): La Fonda, Street View in Santa Fe, New Mexico, sketched by Theodore R. Davis, Courtesy of North Wind Pictures.

  Page 184 (bottom): The Church of San Miguel, Corbis.

  Page 185 (top): The Central Plaza in Santa Fe, North Wind Picture Archives.

  Page 185 (bottom): Map by Heather Saunders.

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