San Francisco who summered there in

rustic retreats and impressive lodges. By the end of the Com-

stock‘s glory days in 1880, the Tahoe Basin was virtually clear

cut. While Tahoe‘s forests fell before the ax, its scenic setting

continued to attract visitors via a rail line from Truckee, California

that connected to the east-west transcontinental railroad line. The

acclaim of Tahoe‘s spectacular scenery became so well known by

1900 that Congress briefly entertained proposals for the creation of

a national park throughout the Tahoe Basin, but established prop-

erty owners successfully opposed the park idea. Beyond the park

proposals, some saw Tahoe as the

water supply for the growing urban

populations of San Francisco or for

farms in Nevada. The latter was

partially realized when the Newlands

Reclamation Project in the Lahontan

Valley east of Reno diverted waters

from the Truckee River as it made

its way along a 116 mile route from

Tahoe to the Paiute Pyramid Lake

Indian Reservation. By and large

Tahoe made it into the Twentieth

Century without being dismantled

for urban water supplies or to supply the never-ending thirst of

desert agriculture. It continued to be a popular summer and even

winter sport destination with the growing popularity of skiing.

Year-round residences became common. On the south shore and

to a lesser extent on the north shore, large resort casinos marked

the skyline in the decades after Nevada legalized gambling in

1931. By the 1960s in the wake of post-World War II growth,

Tahoe communities began to experience traffic congestion, sewage

disposal problems, and erosion damage. All threatened air quality

Founded in 1961, the Western History Association exists to promote the study of the North American

West in its varied aspects and broadest sense.

“Jewel of the Sierra” - Lake Tahoe is Site of the 50th Annual WHA Conference (October 13-16, 2010)

Continued on Page 2

The Newsletter

As a longtime student of western agricul-

tural and resource history, William Rowley

offers an historical overview of Lake Ta-

hoe and the conference destination site.

He is a professor of Nevada history and

Environmental History at the University of

Nevada, Reno, and served as the Secretary

of the WHA from 1973-1990.

Lake Tahoe, or the ―Jewel of the Sierra,‖ is

the highest lake (6,225 feet) for its size in the United States, and

lies astride the elbow-like segment of the California-Nevada

state line. With both a Nevada and a California shoreline, the

interstate nature of the lake presents complicated governance

issues. In an 1845 Report on his western explorations John C.

Frémont noted sighting the lake on February 14, 1844 in a dan-

gerous mid-winter crossing of the Sierra. In that narrative he

called it ―Mountain Lake.‖ Subsequently Frémont tried to name

it Lake Bonpland after a well-known French botanist, but Cali-

fornians chose to call it by the short-lived name of Lake Bigler

after the state‘s third governor. Locals preferred the name given

by the indigenous Washoe people, ―Da-ow-a-ga.‖ Somehow

these syllables became trans-

formed into the word Tahoe,

which the California legislature

accepted as the official name in

1945. The discovery of the rich

gold and silver ore in what was to

be known as the Comstock Lode

began the 1859-60 ―Rush to

Washoe‖ followed by the creation

of Nevada Territory in 1861 and

Nevada statehood in 1864. The

new discoveries just a short dis-

tance from California‘s eastern

reaches and almost directly east of Tahoe attracted immediate

investment capital from San Francisco to develop deep under-

ground quartz mining that created the Comstock towns of Vir-

ginia City, Gold Hill, and Silver City. The underground drifts

and stopes required heavy bracing beams in a system called

square-sets demanding huge supplies of milled lumber. Most of

it came from the Tahoe Basin that also became a place of recrea-

tion for both Comstock residents and prosperous families from

Spring 2010

The WHA Newsletter is a semi-annual publication of the Western History Association. Wm. H. Holmes

Nominating Committee’s

Selection for President-

Elect is Albert Hurtado

Albert L. Hurtado was born and raised in

Sacramento, California, son of a Cuban-

American immigrant who was raised in

Connecticut and a fourth generation An-

glo-Californian mother.

Continued on Page 2

2

The WHA Newsletter Spring 2010

and the pris-

tine clear

nature of the Tahoe‘s waters. While environ-

mental scientists sounded alarm about these

threats to the clarity of the lake, local govern-

ments split by a state line struggled to offer

remedies. Finally in 1970 after the failure of a Bi

State Compact to govern the Basin, both Nevada

and California agreed to contribute to the forma-

tion of a bi-state agency empowered to address

the many environmental threats posed by the

urbanization of Lake Tahoe. In 2010 the Tahoe

Regional Planning Agency (TRPA) marked its

thirtieth anniversary as the chief environmental

governing body of this fragile alpine environ-

ment.

President

John Wunder

University of Nebraska-Lincoln

President-Elect

Quintard Taylor

University of Washington

Executive Director

Kevin J. Fernlund

University of Missouri-St. Louis

WHA Council

Liping Zhu

Eastern Washington University

Peter Blodgett

Huntington Library

Maria Montoya

New York University

Virginia Scharff

University of New Mexico

Katherine Morrissey

University of Arizona

David Gutierrez

University of California, San Diego

Sherry Smith

Southern Methodist University

Dan Flores

University of Montana

Karen Merrill

Williams College

Nominating Committee

William Bauer, Jr.

University of Nevada, Las Vegas

Barbara O. Reyes

University of New Mexico

B. Byron Price

University of Oklahoma

Emily Greenwald

Historical Research Associates, Inc

Marsha Weisiger

New Mexico State University

Lake Tahoe (cont.):

Map of Lake Tahoe. Courtesy of Google Images

Hurtado (cont.) Part of his mother‘s family lived in a nineteenth-

century carriage factory in Nevada City while

others operated a hop ranch on the outskirts of Sacramento. The carriage factory was a frequent

weekend retreat where Hurtado was free to rum-

mage through the rambling structure and to read

the stash of Frank Leslie‘s Illustrated and

Harper‘s Weekly newspapers. As a teenager his

interest in horses evolved into a serious determi-

nation to become a horse trainer in the California

tradition. Old men who had worked on the Miller

and Lux outfit taught him how. He learned about

the bosal and spade bit, the mecate and the fiador

knot. The future seemed to hold more and better horses.

In 1949 the family sold the hop ranch to the state

for the Sacramento State College campus where

the aspiring horse trainer completed a bachelor‘s

degree in history, an educational exercise that

was meant to provide him with employment in-

surance if some contrary colt crippled him. His

senior year changed his life. The required senior

thesis sent him looking into his family‘s old pa-

pers where he found a ledger with the promising

title, ―Secret Minutes of the Nevada City Law

and Order League, 1908.‖ The League turned

out to be a bunch of temperance advocates rather

than the bloody-minded vigilantes that he was

hoping to find, but the process of investigation

and discovery completely captivated him. Gradu-

ate school rather than a round corral defined his

future.

Continued on Page 3

Emblem on Nevada State Flag. Courtesy of Google

Images

3

The WHA Newsletter Spring 2010

50th Anniversary of the WHA

(1961 to 2011)

As the WHA approaches its fiftieth anni-

versary, John Wunder, Sherry Smith and

Quintard Taylor suggested that a commit-

tee of eight consider how the Association

might best approach our next fifty years,

looking broadly at how we might build on

our strengths and address areas needing

attention. Howard Lamar, Janet Fireman, David Edmunds, Benja-

min Johnson, Katherine Benton-Cohen, Anne Butler and Maria

Montoya agreed to serve on the committee, and I agreed to chair

it.

Thus far we have focused on the following: possible revision of

the WHA mission statement; expanding our membership and at-

tracting the next generation drawn to western history; working

with constituencies, such as other organizations, outside the

WHA; insuring the financial health and stability to sustain and

expand our activities; identifying trouble spots in the Associa-

tion‘s basic structure. Our hope is to draft a report in time to sub-

mit it to the council a few weeks prior to our meeting at Lake Ta-

hoe. The council then would decide how to proceed, or not, in

considering our report. Any suggestions especially regarding

broad areas to address, other than those mentioned above, are

most welcome. Please write me: ewest@uark.edu

Hurtado (cont.)

After a stint in the U.S. Army that included tours in

Central Texas and South Korea, Hurtado enrolled in the Masters‘

program in California State University, Sacramento, where he

studied Native American and Western history with Kenneth N. Owens. Owens did the best he could with him and then sent him

on to the University of California, Santa Barbara, where he be-

came the burden of Wilbur R. Jacobs. In the fullness of time Hur-

tado completed a doctoral dissertation and the degree was con-

ferred. Hurtado began his career as a public historian writing

National Register nominations in the California State Office of

Historic Preservation. Among his unheralded accomplishments

was the successful nomination of a nineteenth-century Sacra-

mento bordello, a feat that few other WHA members have

matched. He worked for several years as a contractor in cultural

resources management while holding adjunct appointments at Sierra College and the University of Maryland. In 1983 he landed

an assistant professorship at IUPUI and moved to Arizona State

University three years later. In 1998 he accepted the Travis Chair

in Modern American History at the University of Oklahoma. He

resides in Norman with his wife Jean and four unruly small dogs.

Hurtado‘s books include Indian Survival on the California

Frontier (1988), Intimate Frontiers: Sex, Gender and Culture in

Old California (1999), and John Sutter: A Life on the North

American Frontier (2006) as well as two edited books, Major-

Problems in American Indian History (with Peter Iverson, 1994,

2 ed., 2000), and Reflections on American Indian History: Hon-oring the Past, Building the Future (2008). Herbert E. Bolton

and the Challenge of American History

News Release: Mormon Migration Website

Dr. Fred E. Woods, professor of Church History and Doctrine

at Brigham Young University, Provo, Utah, has recently re-

ported that the Mormon Migration website has been officially

launched at: http://lib.byu.edu/mormonmigration/index.php

This website is hosted by the Harold B. Lee Library at BYU. To

summarize its contents, this website comprises much of his

research on Mormon emigration, immigration, and migration

over the past fifteen years. This first stage of development in-

cludes all of the material from the Mormon Immigration Index

on compact disc (CD-ROM), namely, 543 voyages with about

90,000 Mormon passengers, and over 1,000 first person Latter-

day Saint immigrant accounts for the years from 1840 to 1890,

as well as additional information to interpret the story of the

Mormons immigrating to America during the nineteenth cen-

tury. In the next phase, Dr. Woods will add the digital scans of

the original passenger lists from 1849 to 1932 from European

Emigration Records consisting of passengers lists of foreign

converts from the British Isles and Scandinavia, with specific

records of Latter-day Saints from the Netherlands and Sweden.

In addition, the project will provide the extraction material for

over 2,000 additional voyages as well as the passenger lists and

many additional first person accounts for the entire period of

1840 to 1932. For further information, contact:

Dr. Fred E. Woods

Richard L. Evans Chair of Religious Understanding

Brigham Young University

365 E JSB

Provo, UT 84602

801-422-3366

Formation of the Committee on Race

in the American West At their October 2009 Council meeting, the

Council honored the request of a group of schol-

ars to form the Committee on Race in the Ameri-

can West (CRAW). The Committee includes

Maria E. Montoya, Chair, Karen Leong, Katie

Benton-Cohen, Karl Jacoby, Ernie Chavez, Pablo

Mitchell, Modupe Labode, and Barbara Reyes.

The Committee on Race in the American West (CRAW) shall

have as its function:

To keep the Council and the WHA membership informed

about the issues facing scholars of color in the field.

To promote excellence in the study of race and racial forma-

tions in the American West.

To advocate for increased inclusion and awareness within the

WHA of issues relating to racial diversity both in the history of

the American West and in the association itself.

CRAW has plans to develop initiatives that include: collaborating

with Program Committee members and WHA members to organ-

ize panels to submit to each year‘s Program Committee for con-

sideration; creating a survey of current western historians to as-

sess and address any noticeable pipeline issues; working with the

Western Historical Quarterly to highlight new scholarship by

scholars of color or concerning race in the American West; and

working with the Council to develop an award for the best article

published in the area of Race in the American West. Anyone in-

terested in working with CRAW and/or meeting at the annual

meeting in Reno this year should contact Maria Montoya at

(maria.montoya@nyu.edu).

Continued on Page 6

4

The WHA Newsletter Spring 2010

Enclosed with this newsletter is the ballot for the 2010 council and

nominating committee election. Ballots should be mailed to the

WHA office. All current members (exclusive of sponsoring mem-

bers) will receive a ballot. Joint members should receive two bal-

lots. Only ballots received by September 29, 2010 will be

counted. Please mark only one candidate for each position on the

enclosed postcard ballot and return it to the WHA office.

The following biographical statements have been provided by the

nominees.

Council Position A

Louis Warren is W. Turrentine Jackson Professor

of Western U.S. History at the University of Cali-

fornia, Davis, where he teaches environmental his-

tory, the history of the American West, California

history, and U.S. history. He is author of The

Hunter‘s Game: Poachers and Conservationists in

Twentieth-Century America (Yale, 1997) and Buf-

falo Bill‘s America: William Cody and the Wild

West Show (Alfred A. Knopf, 2005). He is also editor of a popu-

lar classroom text, American Environmental History (Blackwell,

2003), and co-editor of the new peer-reviewed, magazine-format

quarterly called Boom: A Journal of California. He has received

numerous awards for his writing, including the Albert Beveridge

Prize of the American Historical Association, the Caughey West-

ern History Association Prize, the Western Writer‘s of America

Spur Award, the Great Plains Distinguished Book Prize, and the

National Cowboy Hall of Fame Wrangler Award for Best Non-

Fiction Book.

Mark Fiege: I have been a member of the Western History Asso-

ciation since 1992. I received a Ph.D. in history from the Univer-

sity of Utah in 1994, the year that I began teach-

ing western American history at Colorado State

University, Fort Collins. I am author of Irrigated

Eden: The Making of an Agricultural Landscape

in the American West (University of Washington

Press, 1999). My article ―The Weedy West‖ ap-

peared in the Western Historical Quarterly in

1995 and won several prizes, including the

WHA‘s Oscar O. Winther Award. I have pub-

lished several book reviews in the WHQ and refereed article

manuscripts for its editors. In addition, I have served on various

WHA committees, and I regularly attend and participate in the

annual conference. My first WHA conference was 1992 in New

Haven, Connecticut, when I was still a graduate student. The or-

ganization and its members welcomed me then and have treated

me exceptionally well ever since, enabling me to improve my

scholarship and cultivate my interests in a lively intellectual com-

munity. I am excited about the WHA‘s 50th anniversary, and I

look forward to working with other members to maintain an or-

ganization that attracts a diversity of people from academic and

public history fields who have a common interest in the western

American past.

2010 Candidate Information Council Position B

Sandra Schackel has been a committed WHA member since

her graduate school days at the University of New Mexico in

the 1980s. She received her PhD in 1988 in

American history with special fields in the

American West and Women's history. For

twenty-one years, she has taught many varia-

tions on these topics at Boise State University.

She is currently teaching her final class at

BSU and this summer will return to Santa Fe,

New Mexico, to take up the southwestern life-

style she left behind twenty plus years ago.

She has presented papers, moderated and com-

mented on panels, and organized CWWH events many times

at WHA conferences. She has served on the Program Commit-

tee twice (once as co-chair), the Nominating Committee, the

Oscar O. Winther Prize committee and the Jensen/Miller Prize

committee. An early member of the Coalition of Western

Women Historians, she has served in several capacities in this

organization, including four years as Chair of the Steering

Committee. She has always been and continues to be an active

and engaged member of WHA, an organization that has in turn

been of great support and inspiration to her throughout her

academic career.

Considering retirement a transition in one's life journey, Sandy

expects to stay involved and engaged with history while living

in the Southwest. In this next part of her life, she looks for-

ward to serving as a member of the WHA Council. As a re-

covering academic, she will continue to research and

(hopefully) publish on topics yet to be explored, including the

elusive Elvis essay on teenagers and their developing sexual

identity. To her Idahoactivities of hiking, rafting, skiing, and

camping, she will add the welcome task of grandmothering in

Santa Fe. Life is good.

Joseph E. Taylor III is an Associate Profes-

sor in the History and Geography Depart-

ments at Simon Fraser University. He has

been a WHA member since 1992 and served

previously on the Walter Rundell Award

Committee. Jay‘s research focuses on envi-

ronmental relations in the rural West. He has

written Making Salmon: An Environmental

History of the Northwest Salmon Crisis

(Seattle 1999) and Pilgrims of the Vertical:

Yosemite Rock Climbers and Nature at Risk (Cambridge

2010), as well as essays in the WHQ, Environmental History,

Pacific Historical Review, Pacific Northwest Quarterly, Ore-

gon Historical Quarterly, Journal of Historical Geography,

and Journal of the History of Biology. He has also contributed

to public history projects in Oregon, Washington, and British

Columbia, and has served as an expert witness in a tribal treaty

case. Jay‘s central aim is the continued vitality of the WHA,

especially increasing interest in the organization among under-

graduate and graduate students.

5

The WHA Newsletter Spring 2010

Council Position C

George Miles is curator of Western Americana at Yale‘s Be-

inecke Library. Since 1981, he has built the library‘s collection,

provided reference service to patrons from around the world, and

promoted use of the collection through teaching, exhibitions and

publications. He is co-editor with William Cronon and Jay Gitlin

of Under and Open Sky: Rethinking America’s

Western Past (1992), author of James Swan:

Cha-tic of the Northwest Coast (2003), and co-

author with William Reese of Creating Amer-

ica (1992) and America Pictured to the Life

(2002). A member of the WHA since 1981, he

has served as chair of local arrangements for

the 1992 meeting, on the nominating committee

(1997-1998), on two program committees

(1983 & 2002), and two terms on the Dwight L. Smith-ABC-

CLIO Prize committee. He is presently a member of the

Caughey Western History Prize Committee. At the 1992 meet-

ing, he organized a meeting of librarians and archivists from

around the country to discuss issues and opportunities facing the

field. The meeting has become an annual tradition. Miles taught

multiple classes for the Rare Books School at Columbia Univer-

sity and at the University of Virginia. He has consulted with the

American Antiquarian Society, the American Heritage Center at

the University of Wyoming and the Western History Department

of the Denver Public Library. He served on the advisory commit-

tee for ―Lewis and Clark: The National Bicentennial Exhibition‖

and is a member of the executive committee of the Howard R.

Lamar Center for the Study of Frontiers and Borders at Yale.

Theresa Salazar: Since July 1999, she has been the Curator of

The Bancroft Collection, Western Americana, overseeing one of

the largest collections in the country related to the American

West. In 2005, she took on the responsi-

bility for the Latin Americana collections

of the Bancroft Library. She has worked

on the selection and narrative for numer-

ous collaborative digital projects, includ-

ing The Japanese American Relocation

Digital Archive (JARDA); The Chinese

in California; California Cultures; and The 1906 San Francisco

Earthquake and Fire. Along with her other responsibilities she

provides instruction for classes on the UC Berkeley campus and

beyond, and is interested in how students uses primary resources,

both onsite at a repository or remotely. She has organized numer-

ous exhibitions at the Bancroft and contributed articles to books

and journals including: The Chinese in California Through West-

ern Eyes, 2008 (Bancroft Keepsake 53); ―The Bancroft Collection

of Western Americana: Reflections on the Past; Planning for the

Future,‖ in Journal of the West, Winter 2008; and ―Western Ameri-

cana,‖ in Exploring The Bancroft Library, 2006. A member of

WHA since 1999, she is currently on the following WHA com-

mittees: the WHA Dwight L. Smith (ABC-CLIO) Award Com-

mittee and the 2011 WHA Program Committee. From June 1989

till June 1999, she was Special Collection Librarian, University

of Arizona Library, Tucson, AZ, which included materials on the

American southwest and the US/Mexico borderlands. She has

also worked in The Prints and Photographs Division of The New

York Public Library and The Manuscript Division of The Library

of Congress.

Nominating Position A

Alessandra Jacobi Tamulevich is Acquisitions Editor for

American Indian, Latin American, and Classical Studies for the

University of Oklahoma Press and has been with the Press since

2003. Alessandra works directly with authors on scholarly mono-

graphs and general-audience books as well as with series editors

for the New Directions in Native American

Studies Series, the Civilization of the

American Indian Series, the American In-

dian Law and Policy Series, the American

Indian Literature and Critical Studies Se-

ries, and the Oklahoma Series in Classical

Culture. Her goal is to build on the OU

Press‘s long tradition of publishing path-

breaking works on American Indian history

and disseminating unique scholarship. It is especially important

for her to promote Native perspectives and agency. Alessandra

has served on the WHA‘s Indian Student Scholarship Committee

to help promising Native students attend the conference.

Alessandra was raised in Germany and earned her M.A. from the

Johann Wolfgang Goethe University in Frankfurt, Germany. A

full scholarship from the German Academic Exchange Service

(DAAD) enabled her to study at the University of Arizona in

Tucson, where she pursued her interest in American Indian stud-

ies. Before joining the University of Oklahoma Press, Alessandra

gained publishing experience at the University of Nebraska Press

and held positions at the library for the Center of North American

Studies, J. W. Goethe University and at the Santa Barbara Inde-

pendent in Santa Barbara, California.

Andy Kirk: I received my Ph.D. in history with an emphasis on

the American West and Environmental history from the Univer-

sity of New Mexico, 1998. I also studied western history at the

University of Colorado Denver where I re-

ceived my B.A. & M.A. I‘ve been a mem-

ber of the WHA for 19 years and attended

all but one annual meeting during that time.

I consider the WHA my home association

and am always happy to have the opportu-

nity to serve this most unique academic or-

ganization. My research and teaching focus

on the intersections of cultural and environ-

mental history in the modern American

West most recently resulting in, Countercul-

ture Green: The Whole Earth Catalog and American Environ-

mentalism (University Press of Kansas, 2007). I also work exten-

sively in public history. In 1999 I founded UNLV‘s public his-

tory program. Multidisciplinary interests and a desire to create a

dynamic program of engaged scholarship grounded in place

shaped the design and activities of our program and my own pub-

lic history research. We‘ve specialized in innovative cooperative

federal and regional research partnerships. Projects include re-

search on the historic and cultural resources of Western National

Parks, The Nevada Test Site Oral history

2010 Candidate Information

Continued on Page 6

6

The WHA Newsletter Spring 2010

Cummings Prize. Professor Kelman‘s arti-

cles and review essays have appeared in a

number of scholarly and popular publica-

tions, including The Journal of American

History, Journal of Urban History, Reviews

in American History, Technology and Cul-

ture, The Christian Science Monitor, The

Nation, Slate, The Times Literary Supple-

ment, and many others. He is currently

writing a book about the struggle to memorialize the Sand Creek

Massacre.

Thomas Andrews: I specialize in the social and environmental

history of the Rocky Mountain West. Born and raised in Boul-

der, Colorado, I received my B.A. in history and international

studies from Yale and my M.A. and Ph.D.

from Wisconsin-Madison. My first book,

Killing for Coal: America's Deadliest Labor

War (Harvard University Press, 2008), won

the Bancroft Prize, the George Perkins

Marsh Prize, the Caroline Bancroft Award,

the Clark Spence Prize, the Vincent DeSan-

tis Prize, and the Colorado Book Award. I

have also authored prize-winning articles on

assimilation and native resistance in federal

day schools for Native American children;

intercultural conflict and cooperation be-

tween Hispanos and Native Americans on a southern Colorado

frontier; and the erasure of labor from Colorado's leisure land-

scapes in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century.

My current projects include a book-length report for the National

Park Service on the environmental history of the Colorado River

headwaters region of Rocky Mountain National Park and An Ani-

mals' History of the United States, under contract with Harvard. I

have received grants from the EPA, the Huntington Library, the

National Endowment for the Humanities, the American Council

of Learned Societies, the Charles Redd Center, and other organi-

zations. I am passionate about working with current and future K

-12 history teachers, and have participated in a range of Teaching

American History programs, as well as workshops organized by

the National Center for History Education, the National Center

for History in the Schools, and Gilder-Lehrman.

Project http://digital.library.unlv.edu/ntsohp/, and Preserve Ne-

vada a statewide cultural research and preservation group dedi-

cated to linking research in western cultural preservation and

environmental sustainability. If elected to the nominating com-

mittee I will bring my enthusiasm for engaged multidisciplinary

research and teaching to my work in shaping the future direction

of the WHA.

2010 Candidate Information

Nominating Position B

Jeff Shepherd received his Ph.D. from Arizona State University

in 2002 and is interested in the histories of Indigenous people,

especially in the American Southwest and northern Mexico. His

book, We are an Indian Nation: A History of the Hualapai Peo-

ple (University of Arizona Press, 2010) draws upon archival re-

search, participant observation, and oral

histories to investigate the relationships

between Indigenous nation building and

American colonialism. He has received

grants from the American Philosophical

Society, the Max Millett Research Fund,

the Ft. McDowell Indian Nation, and

Texas Tech University. He has also been

a research fellow at the D‘Arcy

McNickle Center for American Indian Culture at the Newberry

Library; and with the National Endowment for the Humanities to

study environmental and borderlands history. He received a

grant and contract from the National Park Service to write an

environmental history of the Guadalupe Mountains in west Texas

and southern New Mexico, which he plans to publish by 2013.

He is beginning a history of Indigenous peoples along the Mexico

-US-Canada borders, tentatively titled ―Creating Homelands,

Contesting Borders: Race, Space, and Belonging among the To-

hono O‘odham and Blackfeet Peoples;‖ and he is co-editor with

Myla Vicenti Carpio of the series, Critical Issues in Indigenous

Studies, with the University of Arizona Press. He teaches gradu-

ate and undergraduate courses on Indigenous, Western, Border,

and Public History, and he is Managing Editor of H-Borderlands.

Durwood Ball is an Associate Professor of

History and editor of the New Mexico His-

torical Review at the University of New

Mexico in Albuquerque. He is the author of

Army Regulars on the Western Frontier,

1848-1861 (2001) and co-editor with Paul

Hutton of Soldiers West: Biographies from

the Military Frontier, 2nd edition (2009). He

is currently researching a biography of fron-

tier dragoon/cavalry officer Edwin Vose

Sumner.

Nominating Position C

Ari Kelman is an associate professor in the Department of His-

tory at UC Davis. His first book, A River and Its City: The Na-

ture of Landscape in New Orleans, won the 2004 Abbott Lowell

Hurtado (cont.)

will be published in 2011.He has published many articles on Na-

tive American, California, borderlands, gender, and public history.

Hurtado‘s publications have won the Billington Prize, Caughey

Prize, Bolton Award, Palladin Award, Neurerberg Award, Koontz Award, and Westerners International Award.

Hurtado‘s service to the WHA includes program committee

chair (1991), nominating committee (1991-1992, chair 1992),

Executive Council (1995-97), Walter Rundell Award Committee

(1998-2000, chair 2000), WHQ Board of Editors (2003-2005),

MartinRidge Award Committee (2006-2008), Co-chair Local Ar-

rangements Committee (2007), and chair of the Bolton-Cutter

Award Endowment Fund Committee (2007-2008).

7

The WHA Newsletter Spring 2010

In Memoriam We had heard a world of talk about the marvellous beauty of

Lake Tahoe, and finally curiosity drove us thither to see it. Three

or four members of the Brigade had been there and located some

timber lands on its shores and stored up a quantity of provisions

in their camp. We strapped a couple of blankets on our shoulders

and took an axe apiece and started--for we intended to take up a

wood ranch or so ourselves and become wealthy. We were on

foot. The reader will find it advantageous to go horseback….We

plodded on, two or three hours longer, and at last the Lake burst

upon us--a noble sheet of blue water lifted six thousand three

hundred feet above the level of the sea, and walled in by a rim of

snow-clad mountain peaks that towered aloft full three thousand

feet higher still! It was a vast oval, and one would have to use up

eighty or a hundred good miles in traveling around it. As it lay

there with the shadows of the mountains brilliantly photographed

upon its still surface I

thought it must surely

be the fairest picture

the whole earth af-

fords.

We never moved a

muscle all night, but

waked at early dawn

in the original posi-

tions, and got up at

once, thoroughly re-

freshed, free from

soreness, and brim

full of friskiness.

There is no end of

wholesome medicine

in such an experience.

That morning we

could have whipped

ten such people as we

were the day before--

sick ones at any rate.

But the world is slow,

and people will go to "water cures" and "movement cures" and to

foreign lands for health. Three months of camp life on Lake Ta-

hoe would restore an Egyptian mummy to his pristine vigor, and

give him an appetite like an alligator. I do not mean the oldest

and driest mummies, of course, but the fresher ones. The air up

there in the clouds is very pure and fine, bracing and delicious.

And why shouldn't it be?--it is the same the angels breathe. I

think that hardly any amount of fatigue can be gathered together

that a man cannot sleep off in one night on the sand by its side.

Not under a roof, but under the sky; it seldom or never rains there

in the summer time. I know a man who went there to die. But he

made a failure of it. He was a skeleton when he came, and could

barely stand. He had no appetite, and did nothing but read tracts

and reflect on the future. Three months later he was sleeping out

of doors regularly, eating all he could hold, three times a day, and

chasing game over mountains three thousand feet high for recrea-

tion. And he was a skeleton no longer, but weighed part of a ton.

This is no fancy sketch, but the truth. His disease was consump-

tion. I confidently commend his experience to other skeletons.

—-From Mark Twain‘s Roughing It (1872)

Born Janet Estelle Shaw in Philadelphia on May 22, 1923, the

historian and friend known to all in WHA as Janet Lecompte died

on February 28, 2010 at the Newton-Wellesley Alzheimer‘s Center

in Wellesley, Massachusetts. Best remembered for her book,

Pueblo, Hardscrabble, Greenhorn: The Upper Arkansas, 1832-1856, this now-classic monograph was chosen by both Westerners

International and Western Writers of America as the best work in

non-fiction for 1978. Lecompte reached out to both scholars and

lay readers with a writing style that captivated and informed her

readers. The culmination of over 30 years of research, the book

brought together the major themes of Lecompte‘s lifetime of work

on the expansion of the fur trade out of St. Louis into the Rocky

Mountains and the Southwest, as well as the socio-economic fabric

of life in remote parts of a multi-cultural borderlands frontier.

Janet spent her early years in Denver and finished high school at

Ogontz School, a private academy in Pennsylvania. An English major at Wellesley, she graduated in 1944 and married Oliver P.

Lecompte, a recent graduate of Yale. Back in Colorado, Janet and

Oliver continued family traditions of success in business and par-

enthood, raising six children (five to adulthood), and contributing

to the cultural and economic life of Denver and Colorado Springs.

Although not drawn to history at an early age and determined to

become a successful writer of fiction, summers at home from col-

lege found Janet working with her mother typing transcriptions of

notes compiled by Francis W. Cragin, a professor at Colorado Col-

lege who interviewed dozens of early Colorado settlers and their

descendants prior to his death in 1937. Deposited at the Pioneers Museum in Colorado Springs, the ―Cragin Papers‖ contained valu-

able biographical information on Colorado and New Mexico‘s

earliest fur trade-era families, archival data that Janet mined

throughout her life.

Recognized by LeRoy Hafen, State Historian of Colorado, as a

gifted researcher and writer, Janet‘s first major publication ap-

peared in The Colorado Magazine in 1950 as ―Huerfano Butte,‖ co

-written with her mother, Dorothy Price Shaw. Four years later,

she was on the trail of the places and characters that would become

central in her study of Arkansas River settlements twenty-five

years later with ―The Hardscrabble Settlement, 1844-1848.‖

During the 1960s, Janet worked closely with Hafen to produce 34

of the 292 biographies in his multi-volume Mountain Men and the

Fur Trade of the Far West through the A. H. Clark Company. In

the course of that research, Janet‘s ability to read and translate both

Spanish and French served her well as she combed archives in St.

Louis, Santa Fe, the Newberry and Huntington libraries, and the

national archives of the US and Mexico. By the end of the project,

no one knew the fur trade of southern Colorado or the leading fur

trade families of St. Louis better than Janet Lecompte. Further-

more, she was one of only ten women historians among the 102

contributors to the series. Her sketches of Creole and French-Canadian fur traders opened doors for subsequent studies of lesser

known mountain men and their families. Ethnohistorians in Can-

ada and the U.S. recognized the value of these biographies and

invited her to present at meetings. Eventually she filled a void by

publishing her fourth and final book through A. H. Clark as

French Fur Traders and Voyageurs in the American West (1995),

twenty-two reprints of the Hafen-series biographies (five of her

own), with a new look at the French contribution to the history of

the American West. –Bill Swagerty, University of the Pacific

Twain on Tahoe

Mark Twain. Courtesy of Google Images.

8

The WHA Newsletter Spring 2010

away. This said, it will take no longer to get from the Reno air-

port to the conference hotel than it did to get from the Denver

airport to the Grand Hyatt.

Most of you will probably fly into Reno and shuttle from there to

the hotel. The WHA has an agreement with North Lake Tahoe

Express (NLTE), a local shuttle company. Because there is rela-

tively limited ground transportation, I would advise that you

make your reservation with NLTE ahead of time, to avoid any

delays at the airport. You may find our link to NLTE on the

WHA‘s website (www.westernhistoryassociation.org).

On a different note, I would like to urge you to study the candi-

date information provided inside and vote. You should find an

attached ballot. I mention this because voter turnout, which is

never very high, was somewhat down last year. So please take a

moment to reinvigorate the democracy of our intellectual associa-

tion by exercising your franchise. Kevin Fernlund

Dear Members,

There are a number of ways to test the strength of an association.

Certainly one such test is whether an association is able to fill a

major hotel in a bad economy. Well, in October 2009, at the

WHA‘s 49th Annual Conference, we not only met our room block

(1,000 room nights) at the Grand Hyatt Denver, we exceeded it.

And we not only met our food and beverage minimum, $35,000,

we exceeded it. In fact, over eight hundred and one attendees

registered for the conference. Simply put, the Denver meeting

was a financial success.

Our membership recruitment efforts were also successful last

year, with membership topping 1,300. Over half of the new mem-

bers were graduate students, which speaks well of our associa-

tion‘s future. Between the revenues we generate at our meetings

(and thank you for staying at the conference hotel!) and the dues

we collect for membership, we ended last year in the black. For

those of you who have moved up a membership category, e.g.,

from Regular to Sustaining, a special thank you. This extra con-

tribution makes a very big difference to the WHA. Also, the

value of our investments, the return on which is used to fund our

awards program, has largely recovered from the Crisis of ‗08,

even if many universities and colleges, including my own, con-

tinue to struggle with the economic fallout. Indeed, I am very

happy to report that thanks to your continued support the WHA‘s

finances remain solid.

Our Teaching Western History Committee, co-chaired by Brian

Collier and Lindsey Passenger, has some big news. The WHA

has received another $15,000 grant from the U.S. Library of Con-

gress. This is our second LOC grant. We received one in 2009,

too. The LOC grant will allow the WHA to host a workshop--"A

Teaching with Primary Sources and Active Learning Work-

shop"—concurrent with the WHA's next annual meeting. The

WHA will put up $5,000. So between this grant and the grant in

2009, the WHA will spend $40,000 building ties to the K-12

community.

We are now busy preparing for our 50th Annual Meeting, which

will be held on October, 13-16, 2010, along the northeast shore of

Lake Tahoe. John Wunder, the WHA President, and I conducted

a site visit of the conference hotel in January. We both came

away very excited about the location, the facilities and amenities,

and the spectacular outdoor setting. If you have never been to

Lake Tahoe, this is a meeting you will not want to miss.

Unlike our other meetings, the conference hotel is not located in a

downtown location. The Hyatt Regency Lake Tahoe is a resort

located in a village. The room rate at the hotel is $139.00 per

night—which includes a $10.00 resort fee, although the two

charges will appear separately on your bill. If visiting an urban

center is a must, the city of Reno, Nevada, is about 45 minutes

Fromthe Director

From the Director

The First WHA Program Cover, 1961.

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