Glasgow / Gardner / Simmons — Brothers on the Santa Fe and Chihuahua Trails, signed (UPC, 1993)

What this book is

Edward James Glasgow (1820–1908) and William Henry Glasgow (1822–1897) were brothers from St. Louis, Missouri, who in the spring of 1846 set out to haul several wagonloads of trade goods over the Santa Fe Trail to Mexico. The American declaration of war against Mexico on May 13, 1846, transformed their commercial venture into something much more consequential: the Glasgows and other Southwestern traders found themselves swept up in General Stephen Watts Kearny's Army of the West as it occupied New Mexico and pushed south into Chihuahua. They would not return home for two years.

The brothers wrote home to their family in St. Louis throughout the period and kept journal entries documenting their experiences. The letters and journals reveal the intersection of mercantile commerce and military occupation in the early Mexican-American War: encounters with Stephen Watts Kearny and Mrs. Manuel Armijo (the wife of the deposed New Mexico governor), firsthand accounts of the battles of Sacramento and Santa Cruz de Rosales, encounters with the historical actors of Doniphan's Expedition (Alexander William Doniphan led the campaign south through Chihuahua), and the daily texture of trail life under wartime conditions.

The Glasgow papers passed down through the family for over a century, then through scholarly channels to Mark L. Gardner, a historian based in Cascade, Colorado, who serves on the Santa Fe National Historic Trail Advisory Council (Department of the Interior appointment, 1988). Gardner spent years on the editorial work that produced this 1993 University Press of Colorado scholarly edition. Marc Simmons (the dean of NM popular history; signature pool closed at his death in 2023) wrote the foreword. The book is now the standard primary-source reference for the Glasgow brothers' role in the 1846–1848 NM/Chihuahua period.

The book is structured as a heavily annotated edition: extensive editorial introduction by Gardner placing the Glasgows in context, the brothers' letters and journals reproduced in full with apparatus, period illustrations and maps, and appendices including the Glasgows' inventory of goods and a register of trail contacts. The dust-jacket lithograph reproduces a 19th-century scene of cavalry skirmish around a Mexican flag in the high-desert mountains — a near-contemporary depiction of the kind of action the Glasgows witnessed.

Why this copy matters

This is a signed first edition with three layers of collector value:

• Mark L. Gardner signature on the title page in dark ink — the editor and the working scholar of the volume. Gardner is still actively living and writing as of 2026 (his subsequent books include Fort Union and the Upper Missouri Fur Trade, Oklahoma 2001, and Jedediah Smith: No Ordinary Mountain Man, Oklahoma 2009), but signed firsts of his earlier work are increasingly hard to source.
• Marc Simmons foreword (closed pool, d. September 2023) — the popular-history dean's authorial voice elevating the volume's reach into the popular NM-history audience.
• Hardcover with dust jacket, full printing line (10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1) — a true first printing of the first edition, in the original cloth binding with original color-lithograph dust jacket intact and clean.

For Santa Fe Trail / Mexican-American War / Doniphan's Expedition collectors, the signed first edition is one of the top-tier pieces in the modern (post-1990) scholarly Santa Fe Trail literature.

Multi-part bibliographic record

How it came in

Donated in May 2026 through NMLP. Donor scenario anonymized per archive policy. Hardcover with original dust jacket; jacket clean and uncreased. The Mark L. Gardner signature on the title page is the high-value provenance datapoint.

Where it's going

Likely route: a Santa Fe Trail / Mexican-American War / Doniphan's Expedition specialist collector, a Mark L. Gardner completist, a fur-trade and Western-history scholar, or a major university Special Collections building a SW US scholarly trail-history shelf. Signed UPC scholarly-trade firsts of this era are scarce in the secondary market.