From his earliest sketches of Texas cattle in 1876 until his death in 1945, Texas master Frank Reaugh dedicated his life and career to telling the stories of the great cattle drives from Texas to points north. He collaborated wiith writer Clyde Walton Hill and composer David Guion to create one of the first performance-art pieces in Texas and in the United States in 1933. Reaugh's Twenty-Four Hours with the Herd debuted in Oak Cliff in 1933 and was performed in Waco and at the Texas Centennial Exposition in Dallas in 1936. The San Angelo Museum of Fine Arts assembled an abbreviated version of Twenty-Four Hours with the Herd in 2021. This presentation will show the 2021 version with commentary by Michael R. Grauer, authority on Frank Reaugh and author of Rounded Up in Glory: Frank Reaugh, Texas Renaissance Man.
Meet Michael Grauer
Mr. Grauer holds a Bachelor of Fine Arts in painting and a Bachelor of Fine Arts in art history from the University of Kansas; Master of Arts in art history from Southern Methodist University; and Master of Arts in history from West Texas A&M University. Beginning his career at Smithsonian American Art Museum in 1984, he was curator of art and Western heritage at Panhandle-Plains Historical Museum for 31 years. He was recruited to become McCasland Chair of Cowboy Culture and curator of cowboy collections and Western art at the National Cowboy & Western Heritage Museum where he worked for six years. He has curated over 160 exhibitions and authored over 75 publications on art, culture, and history of the American West. He taught at West Texas A&M University for over twenty years. He was the 2012 University of Kansas Department of Art History's distinguished alumnus. He was inducted into the Kansas Cowboy Hall of Fame at Dodge City, Kansas, as Cowboy Historian for 2021.
During the American Civil War women and children in the Cherokee Nation suffered tremendously. Hannah Worcester Hicks, the daughter of famed missionary Samuel Austin Worcester, and her Cherokee husband Abijah Hicks lived near Fort Gibson as the war raged in the western Ozarks. Hannah's diary provides community members, her descendants, and scholars with insight into the chaos of war in the Ozarks, the important connections between the Cherokee Nation's citizens and communities like Van Buren and Fort Smith, and the intense division at work in the Cherokee Nation at a critical time for the nation's survival. The Hicks' tragic story illustrates the human cost of war in Indigenous nations and western Ozark communities.
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.
Most publications on the Texas Revolution tend to focus on the major battles and notable events, but few concentrate on the Texian army's movements between the battles. Shortly after arriving in Gonzales to take command of the gathered Texian forces there, General Sam Houston learned that the Alamo had fallen. Realizing that his small force was in no condition to meet the full force of the Mexican army, he ordered a rapid withdrawal of the army to the Colorado River while also escorting panicked civilians. When Mexican forces arrived opposite the Texian army on this formidable river, a pivotal battle seemed imminent. After days of nervous anticipation, Texian soldiers were stunned to unexpectedly hear that General Houston was ordering a withdrawal from the Colorado. 11 Days on the Colorado provides a day-by-day account of events during and after the withdrawal to the Colorado and will reveal Houston's mindset during this time and offer explanations for some of his curious decisions.
Meet James E. Brasher
James E. Brasher earned an advanced degree in geology from Texas A&M University. He worked for the past 40 plus years in the oil industry and then groundwater conservation and has written several technical articles on subsurface geology. James, a native of Weimar and current resident of Columbus, Texas, is a descendant of one of Stephen F. Austin's Old 300.
James' affinity for historic research was borne in part from his assistance in researching figures from the past for Amanda Danning, his wife and a renowned forensic sculptor. One notable project was the work by Amanda on facial reconstructions of some Mexican soldiers from the battlefield of San Jacinto. James soon afterward authored a magazine article about the Texian's withdrawal from Gonzales to the Colorado River after the fall of the Alamo which served as a forerunner to this book. Amanda Danning provided illustrations for the book.
Years of building tensions on the southern plains culminated in the Red River War of 1874-1875. The large-scale theft of horses and cattle was one of the leading causes of the conflict. Systems of theft overlapped and reinforced each other. Comanches and Kiowas from the Staked Plains and their reservation in Indian Territory raided frontier herds with growing intensity during the late 1860s and early 1870s. New Mexican traders and government officials helped incentivize these forays by offering a reliable market for stolen stock. Simultaneously, white rustlers from Texas struck Indian herds north of the Red River. Stock thieves from Kansas also wreaked havoc on the Cheyenne and Arapaho Reservation. Until 1874, the federal government was largely ineffective at suppressing the theft of horses and cattle on the southern plains. Rivalries over jurisdictional boundaries, vigorous policy disagreements, and market economics combined to limit the government's effectiveness in dealing with the emerging crisis. Not until the army crushed the military power of the Cheyennes, Comanches, and Kiowas would horse and cattle herds in Indian Territory and northwest Texas be relatively safe from large-scale rustling.
Meet David Beyreis
David Beyreis is a historian of the Great Plains and Southwest borderlands. He is the author of Blood in the Borderlands: Conflict, Kinship, and the Bent Family, 1821-1920, which received the Gaspar Perez de Villagra Award from the Historical Society of New Mexico and the Louise Barry Writing Award from the Santa Fe Trail Association. His journal articles have received the Coke Wood Award for Best Historical Monograph or Article from the Westerners International, Western Heritage Wrangler Award from the National Cowboy & Western Heritage Center, and Spur Award from the Western Writers of America. His current book project is tentatively titled Soldier Girls: Native Women and the Wars for the Great Plains and is under contract with the University of Nebraska Press. He teaches history and government at Saint Mary's School in Raleigh, North Carolina. He is a member of Fort Worth Westerners.