Blood and Thunder

General Kearny threw a Governor’s Ball in Santa Fe on the night of September 24, 1846. Through the diary of army wife Susan Magoffin, Sides reflects on the cast of characters. Susan was perhaps the first Anglo-American woman to journey so far into the southwest and “the sole American woman among 1,600 American men” (169). Only 18 years old, her diary captured a crucial part of American history.

Magoffin introduces a few locals like Madame La Tules, a local brothel owner, whom Magoffin relates as “stately” and having ”that shrewd sense and fascinating manner necessary to allure [young men] to the hall of final ruin” (165-6). The New Mexican women were generally dressed and behaved more provocatively, in the soldiers’ eyes, than their American counterparts.

But Susan spends more time on the American men, “the future of the territory: judges, bankers, engineers, businessmen, the whole new American imprint on the ancient country” (165-6). Highlights include Charles Bent, the owner of Bent’s Fort and a friend of Carson’s, who would become the governor of New Mexico when Kearny continued his conquest in California. Present too was Colonel Alexander Doniphan, who had no military training but was an accomplished defense lawyer who later would broker a truce with the Navajo.