Join us for a trip all the way out West with author Janet Sands for a thought-provoking new take on the California missions and presidios — Spain's final project in the New World. Everyone loves to visit these iconic, beautifully restored historic sites, but their story is far more interesting — and significant — than most visitors realize; it's inextricably linked to global history, geopolitics, to the founding of or our country, and even to Texas.
Meet Janet Dowling Sands
Current Sheriff of the Flagstaff, Arizona, Corral of Westerners and past Sheriff of the Santa Barbara Corral, Ms. Sands is a California native with a degree in Art History from U.C. Berkeley. Her broad perspective on history has been shaped by many years of collaboration with academic historians and research scientists as a longtime board member of the Santa Barbara Museum of Natural History and the Institute of Human Origins at Arizona State University. Bringing together the expertise of both institutions, she played a key role in developing and organizing two international symposia on Human Origins. Topics included the "Great Human Diaspora" that began in Africa and ended with the peopling of the Americas—a subject that Ms. Sands covers in her books and lectures as a necessary and fascinating prequel to post-contact history of California and the West. To purchase her book On a Mission on which her presentation is based, see the Santa Barbara Historical Museum's online store. Her current project is Collision of Cultures: Ancient Peoples, Pueblos, and Spanish Missions of the Southwest.
The cattle drives of the post-Civil War era along various trails constituted the largest man-made overland domestic migration of cattle in history. This was also where the legend of the American Cowboy became reality. Cowboy poetry celebrates that history along with contemporary ranch life. Ron says his cowboy poetry honors that history while being fun, family-friendly, patriotic, and most of the time, it even rhymes.
Meet Ron Wilson
Ron Wilson is a cowboy poet from the Lazy T Ranch near Manhattan, Kansas. He works as a rural development specialist for Kansas State University, where he earned a B.S. degree in agricultural education and a master's degree in mass communications. He worked for the U.S. Senate Agriculture Committee before returning to Kansas.
He serves as national secretary of the Western Wordsmiths chapter, an official spokesperson for the National Day of the Cowboy organization, an Ambassador for the National Multicultural Western Heritage Museum in Fort Worth, Texas, and legislative chair for the International Chisholm Trail Association. He writes a biweekly cowboy poetry column titled Cowboy Up, chairs the annual Kansas Cowboy Poetry Contest, and is host of the monthly online Cattle Trails Showcase video program. He was proclaimed "Poet Lariat" (not laureate) by the Governor of Kansas. In 2022, he was inducted as a cowboy entertainer in the Kansas Cowboy Hall of Fame.
In 2023, Log Cabin Village honored the lives of two individuals enslaved at the Port Sullivan Plantation Home which today serves as the Village's main entrance and museum store. During this presentation, Log Cabin Village Assistant Site Supervisor, Shae Nawoj, will share the research that led to the installation of two memorial Stopping Stones at the Village and the ways such efforts can be used to tell the stories of our enslaved ancestors in a meaningful and relevant way.
Meet Shae Nawoj
Shae Nawoj works as the Assistant Historic Site Supervisor at Log Cabin Village in Fort Worth. She has worked in the museum field at institutions as varied as Saint-Gaudens National Historic Site, Gettysburg National Military Park, Colonial Williamsburg, and the Buffalo Bill Center of the West. Her background includes studies in public history with an emphasis on 19th-century American history and memory, with a BA from Sam Houston State University and an MA from the University of Maryland, Baltimore County. At Log Cabin Village she works as part of a team on a mission to set the record straight about the complexities of life on the Texas frontier.
There were no less than 16 train robberies along the southern corridor between Yuma and El Paso. Almost all of them come back one way or another to Cochise County where the outlaws hid, came from, or were peace officers, sometimes both outlaw and peace officer. The tales are often amusing.
Meet Doug Hocking
Doug Hocking has completed advanced studies in American history, ethnology, and historical archaeology. Raised on the Jicarilla Apache Reservation, Doug retired from the US Army after serving in military intelligence and as an officer in armored cavalry. He is the author of many award-winning books of Southwest history including: Southwest Train Robberies; Terror on the Santa Fe Trail: Kit Carson and the Jicarilla Apache; Tom Jeffords, Friend of Cochise; and The Black Legend: George Bascom, Cochise, and the Start of the Apache Wars, about the Bascom Affair.
The second Battle of Adobe Walls occurred on June 27, 1874. 2024 is the sesquicentennial of this critical event that set off a chain reaction across the Southern Plains and precipitated the Red River War. This presentation will look at the "Truth, Myths, and Consequences" of the second Battle of Adobe Walls.
Meet Michael R. Grauer
Michael R. Grauer is the McCasland Chair of Cowboy Culture/Curator of Cowboy Collections and Western Art at the National Cowboy & Western Heritage Museum in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma. Mr. Grauer holds a Bachelor of Fine Arts in painting and a Bachelor of Fine Arts in art history from the University of Kansas; the Master of Arts in art history from Southern Methodist University; and the Master of Arts in history from West Texas A&M University.
He began his career at the Smithsonian American Art Museum in 1984 and has been a museum curator for 36 years. From 1987 to 2018 he was curator of art and Western heritage at Panhandle-Plains Historical Museum, at Canyon, Texas, the largest history museum in Texas. He has curated over 160 exhibitions on Western art, culture, and history, authored over 75 publications, and appeared in ten documentaries in the US and in Germany.
Mr. Grauer taught art history and Western American Studies at West Texas A&M University from 1999 to 2017. He was the University of Kansas Kress Foundation Department of Art History's distinguished alumnus for 2012. In September 2021, his book Making a Hand: The Art of H. D. Bugbee received the Western Heritage Wrangler Award for Best Western Art Book for 2020. He was inducted into the Kansas Cowboy Hall of Fame at Dodge City, Kansas, as Cowboy Historian for 2021. He was image editor and contributor of two essays for the forthcoming volume from Texas A&M University Press, Making the Unknown Known: Women in Early Texas Art, 1860s-1960s.
In 2024, the Great Western Trail is celebrating its 150th anniversary. Looking back from the perspective of 150 years by connecting historical events happening at the same time in the same location, the panhandle of Texas, history becomes more focused, more understandable. The root causes of the socioeconomic volatility on the high plains gives apparent answers to why south Texas rancher John T Lytle initiated the Great Western Trail in 1874 to drive 3,500 longhorns to Nebraska for a humanitarian purpose to Sioux Chief Red Cloud and his tribe of 10,000 with General George Armstrong Custer signing for the herd.
Why did John T. Lytle trail through the Red River War area, toxic panhandle area of Texas where buffalo hunters, Comanches, Kiowa, Cheyenne, and the US military were destined to stage the last stand of the Lords of the Plains? The big picture comes into focus answering many historical questions.
Meet Sylvia Gann Mahoney
Sylvia Gann Mahoney is the author of two books: Finding the Great Western Trail (TTU Press) and College Rodeo: From Show to Sport (Texas A&M Press). She was the 2023-2024 president of the West Texas Historical Association, the second oldest Texas historical association; a founder and the first executive director of the Western Heritage Museum & Lea County Cowboy Hall of Fame; NMJC rodeo coach; and Western Junior College Athletic Hall of Fame inductee. She was co-chair of "Marking the Great Western Trail from Mexico to Canada" for Rotary, and taught literature, research, and writing for 33 years in public schools and colleges in New Mexico and Texas.
Quanah Parker provides an example of the changing times in which many Native American tribes lived and how they were able to adapt. Parker was influential and learned how to move between Comanche culture and the white culture that swept in from the east. He refers to Indians as "his people," yet embraces the white way and encourages other Indians to do the same. What we find in studying Parker is a person who was able to thrive in two different worlds, maintaining loyalties to both. Parker raided Mexican and American settlements and fought encroachment on his land. Yet, he later worked hand in hand with outsiders to provide the best deal moving forward, for himself and the tribe, against the same people he had fiercely fought years before. Examining his past and Comanche culture provides clues to his success in navigating the new reality he faced.
Meet Dr. Colt Chaney
Dr. Colt Chaney is a history professor at Dallas College Mountain View Campus. He is an Oklahoma native. In his college days, he trained horses and participated in team roping events at the amateur and professional levels. He received his Masters and PhD degrees in US History from Oklahoma State University. His areas of interest are Native American, US West, and Public History. His dissertation is on Native American representation in film (Westerns primarily) from 1950-1970. Dr. Chaney taught history at Murray State College in Oklahoma and Tyler Junior College prior to his current position at Dallas College.
In the spring of 1855, one of America's most notorious filibusters, William Walker, invaded Nicaragua to capitalize on that country's civil war. Two years later, the San Antonio Ledger reported "a large and enthusiastic meeting of the friends and sympathizers of Gen. Walker was held in front of the Court-House on this evening." Shortly thereafter, the "Alamo Rangers" headed to Nicaragua to assist Walker's colonization efforts. Led by Capt. Marcellus French, the foray explains much about Texans during the antebellum years, and about French, whose role in multiple arenas firmly connects him to Texas and American history during the second half of the nineteenth century.
Meet Dr. Deborah Liles
Deborah Liles is an Associate Professor and the W. K. Gordon Chair of Texas History at Tarleton State University. She is the author or co-editor of five books, including Women in Civil War Texas: Diversity and Dissidence in the Trans-Mississippi (2016 Liz Carpenter Award for best book on Texas Women's History and the Ottis Lock Award for book of the year); Texas Women and Ranching: On the Range, At the Rodeo, In the Community (Liz Carpenter Award), and African Americans in Central Texas History: From Slavery to Civil Rights. She is the author of multiple book chapters and articles in scholarly publications and has been a guest on public television documentaries in the US and Europe. Current book and online projects examine the history of slavery and of the antebellum and Civil War livestock industry in Texas.
"A Trail Bride" explores the experiences of several women who made the arduous trek from Texas to Kansas on the famed Chisholm Trail during the late 19th century. Martin's program shares multiple women's experiences but focuses primarily on the first-hand account of Mary Taylor Olivette Bunton. Bunton made the trip up the Chisholm Trail with her husband shortly after their marriage, and she later chronicled her adventure and published her experiences.
Meet Dr. Michelle M. Martin
Dr. Michelle M. Martin is a Michigander by birth and a Kansan and Okie by choice. Martin is a historian who earned her doctorate at the University of New Mexico in May 2022. Her research probes interracial marriage, gender, race, and power in the Mvskoke Nation in the Indian Territory from 1870-1897.
She earned her B.A. and M.A. degrees in history at Western Michigan University. After graduating, Martin embarked on a nearly twenty-year career in academic and public history. For nine years she taught full and part time at the two and four year college level in Kansas and Oklahoma. She also worked in the television and film industry for nearly ten years as a researcher, script writer, and field producer. Projects she has contributed to have aired on PBS, A&E, History Channel, Investigation Discovery, and at National Park Service units in Kansas, Missouri, and Arkansas. For several years Martin worked as a museum director, and she has served on numerous museum boards and has provided consulting services for small museums in Kansas and Oklahoma. Martin has also lectured on various historical topics across the country for museums, state and national historic sites, and educational institutions.
Her research interests include the intersections of gender, race, and ethnicity in the U.S. West from 1800-1900, the history of Indigenous-Euro American relations in the Indian Territory (in the Mvskoke and Semvnole Nations specifically) from 1840-1925, interracial marriage and families in the United States during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and gender and race based violence in the West.
She is currently an Assistant Professor of History and the Coordinator of the Public History Certificate in the Department of History at Northeastern State University in Tahlequah, Oklahoma. Tahlequah is the capital of the Cherokee Nation of Oklahoma and the United Keetoowah Band of Cherokee.
Martin lives in Tahlequah and is a proud cat mamma to Josie. Her husband, Dr. Donald Fixico (Mvskoke/Semvnole/Shawnee/Sac and Fox) is a Distinguished Foundation Professor and Regents' Professor of History at Arizona State. The couple travel back and forth between their two homes. When not working, Michelle enjoys hiking, travel, photography, documenting severe weather, watching college and professional football, and volunteering as a living history interpreter at various state and national historic sites.
The Concho Mail Station was the headquarters of the Concho Division of the San Antonio to El Paso Stage Line from 1869 to 1882. The stage line was also nicknamed the Ben Ficklin Stage Line, after the primary owner and founder of the line, Benjamin Ficklin. It was located three miles south of Fort Concho, San Angelo, Texas. The station ended in 1882 when a great flood swept through the area of the mail station and the nearby town of Ben Ficklin, wiping both off the map. This new archeological study identified the entire station layout, including a military camp, two corrals, a blacksmith shop, wheelwright and paint shops, harness storage and maintenance building, sheds for coaches, a commissary, a mess hall, a large stone home for the manager, and multiple picket houses for the employees.
Meet Tom Ashmore
Tom Ashmore spent 22 years in the Air Force as a special intelligence analyst. After retiring from active duty, he taught intelligence skills for another 20 years for the Air Force Intelligence School at Goodfellow AFB, Texas. He headed up avocational archeological investigations for the Concho Valley and Iraan Archeological Societies and worked closely with the Texas Archeological Society over the last 15 years. He completed a book in 2019 on his Butterfield Trail investigations, The Butterfield Trail Through the Concho Valley and West Texas. He is currently president of the West Texas Archeological Society and a board member of the Southwest Federation of Archeological Societies.