Drought in the Great Plains to be topic of Sandoz Society conference

Dan Louie Flores is the A.B. Hammond Chair in Western History at the college in Missoula. He specializes in cultural and environmental studies of the American West and has received an array of awards for articles and books about the Great Plains and Rocky Mountains from west Texas into Montana.  His presentation is free and will be at 7:30 p.m. Sept. 26 in Memorial Hall.

Flores was born and raised and received much of his education in historic Natchitoches, La., where his family had lived for nearly 300 years.  He earned both his bachelor’s and master’s degrees from Northwestern State University in that city and holds a doctorate from Texas A&M University.

He taught at Texas Tech University at Lubbock and has been at the University of Montana for 20 years.  He also has a home in the Galisteo River Valley outside Santa Fe, New Mexico.

He has written three books about the Southern Plains, one of which, “Caprock Canyonlands,” has been in print continuously since 1990. Now a resident of the Bitterroot Valley of Montana, he has written three more books about his new geographic region. His latest book, published in 2010, is “Visions of the Big Sky: Painting and Photography in the Northern Rocky Mountain West.”

Flores is working on three more books, including: “Bringing Home all the Pretty Horses: The Horse Trade and the American West;” “The Sacred Circle: Indians and Buffalo in North America’s History,” and “Coyote America: A Natural and Supernatural History.”

He notes that he has a long association with the works of Mari Sandoz. “When you grow up fascinated by open, horizontal yellow spaces, you discover Mari Sandoz early on. ‘Cheyenne Autumn’ was my introduction to Sandoz and I read it while I was still in Louisiana…. At some point along the way I also was captivated enough by ‘The Horsecatcher’ that I still use that book in the Indians/Bison/Horses course I have long taught at the University of Montana. In other words, I’ve been living with Mari Sandoz books within reach on my bookshelves for the better part of 40 years,” Flores said.

Topics for breakout sessions Sept. 27 include: Setting the Water Table; Women and Drought; Indigenous Approaches to Drought and the Environment and Ranching and Forestry on the Plains. Registration is available on the society website at www.marisandoz.org.

For more information contact J.L. Schmidt at 402-890-9063 or jlschmidt@USA.net.

The lecture series is funded from an endowment created from the sale of Dawes County ranchland that Esther Pilster donated to the Sandoz Society in 2006.