At The End Of The Santa Fe Trail

At the End of the Santa Fe Trail, first published in 1932 (and reprinted in 1948), is Sister Blandina Segale's account of her life in the southwestern U.S. from 1872 to 1892. Sister Blandina (1850-1941), born in Italy and emigrating with her family to Cincinnati when she was a child, worked with the poor, the sick, immigrants, prisoners, and Native Americans while in Trinidad, Colorado, and in Santa Fe and Albuquerque, New Mexico (and later in Ohio). The book is based in large part on her journal and on the letters she exchanged with her sister Justina, who was also a religious sister in Ohio. At a time when lawlessness and brutality were the norm, Sister Blandina displayed courage, tough-mindedness, and a deep religious faith in service to the less-fortunate. Recent efforts have been made by the Archdiocese of Santa Fe to have Sister Blandina made a saint.

At the End of the Santa Fe Trail is Sister Blandina Segale's account of her life in the southwestern U.S. from 1872 to 1892. Sister Blandina displayed courage, tough-mindedness, and a deep religious faith in service to the less-fortunate. Recent efforts have been made by the Archdiocese of Santa Fe to have Sister Blandina made a saint.

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In 1852, seven-year-old Marion Sloan travels with her mother and older brother in a wagon train along the Santa Fe Trail, experiencing both hardship and wonder.

Few of the great overland highways of America have known such a wealth of color and romance as that which surrounded the Santa Fé Trail. For over four centuries the dust-gray and muddy-red trail felt the moccasined tread of Comanches, Apaches, Cheyennes, and Arapahoes. These soft footfalls were replaced by the bold harsh clang of the armored conqueror, Coronado, and by a host of Spanish explorers and soldiers seeking the gold of fabled Quivira. Black and brown-robed priests, armed only with the cross, were followed in turn by bearded buckskin-clad fur traders and mountain men, by canny Indian traders, and lean, weather-beaten drovers with great herds of long-horned cattle. [...] The story dictated in such vivid detail by Marian Sloan Russell is a unique and valuable eyewitness account by a sensitive, intelligent girl who grew to maturity on the kaleidoscopic Santa Fé Trail. “Maid Marian,” as she was known by the freighters and soldiers, made five round-trip crossings of the trail before settling down to live her adult life along its deeply rutted traces. —From Foreword “When it was first published in 1954, Marian Russell’s Land of Enchantment was praised as an outstanding memoir of life on the Santa Fe Trail...Now readers everywhere can enjoy Mrs. Russell’s recollections,... And those readers will discover that Mrs. Russell described much more than just life on the Trail. Indeed her memoirs cover virtually every aspect of life in the West...—Southwest Review “These memoirs reveal a strong, energetic woman whose perceptions of old Santa Fe and pioneer life on the trail paint a vivid picture of the nineteenth-century West. The unusual and exact details which Marian Russell recalls make her story enthrallingly real.”—American West