Dan Flores

Dan Louie Flores (born 1948) is an American historian who specializes in cultural and environmental studies of the American West. He held the A.B. Hammond Chair in Western History at the University of Montana in Missoula, Montana until he retired in May of 2014.

Background

Flores was born in Vivian in northern Caddo Parish in far northwestern Louisiana and reared in nearby Rodessa. During the 1970s, he procured the Master of Arts degree in history from Northwestern State University in Natchitoches, Louisiana. He thereafter obtained his Ph.D. from Texas A&M University in College Station, Texas, where he studied under Professor Herbert H. Lang.^[1] He then taught at Texas Tech University in Lubbock under the chairperson Alwyn Barr. Thereafter, Flores relocated to the University of Montana and retired in 2014. He is currently A.B Hammond Chair Emeritus and resides in the Gallisteo Valley outside Santa Fe, New Mexico.^[2]

Publications

Flores is the author of eight books, including Horizontal Yellow: Nature and History in the Near Southwest (1999),^[3]The Natural West: Environmental History in the Great Plains and Rocky Mountains (2001),^[4] and Southern Counterpart to Lewis and Clark: The Freeman and Custis Expedition of 1806, a 2002 study of the Red River Expedition, a southwestern journey authorized by U.S. President Thomas Jefferson at the same time that Meriwether Lewis and William Clark were completing their journey along the Missouri River from St. Louis, Missouri, to the Pacific Northwest from 1804-1806.^[5] The Red River Expedition, led by Thomas Freeman and Dr. Peter Custis, never received the attention garnered by Lewis and Clark and is mostly unknown to most educators and many historians as well because Freeman and Custis were turned back by the Spanish before they had accomplished their goals.

With Eric Bolen, Flores in 1993 published The Mississippi Kite: Portrait of a Southern Hawk.^[6] With Amy Winton, he published in 1989 Canyon Visions: Photographs and Pastels of the Texas Plains.^[7] Still another Flores work is a study of the Indian trader Anthony Glass, entitled Journal of an Indian Trader: Anthony Glass and the Texas Trading Frontier, 1790-1810.^[8] In 2004, Flores wrote the chapter "Societies to Match the Scenery: Twentieth-Century Environmental History in the American West," in A Companion to the American West by William Deverell, ed.^[2]

Flores' work has also appeared in such popular venues as Texas Monthly magazine, The Big Sky Journal, Southwest Art, and High Country News. His publications have been recognized by the Western History Association, Western Writers of America, the University of Oklahoma Press, the National Cowboy and Western Heritage Museum in Oklahoma City, and the Texas State Historical Association.

In 2010, Flores published Visions of the Big Sky: Painting and Photography in the Northern Rocky Mountain West.^[9] In promoting his book, Flores wrote: "It's been said that a place doesn't exist until a writer, a photographer, or a painter portrays it and presents a version of it to the rest of the culture."^[10] In 2010, Flores also released a 20th anniversary edition of his 1990 volume, Caprock Canyonlands: Journey Into the Heart of the Southern Plains, a study of the unique terrain of West Texas.^[2]

In 2008, Flores presented the prestigious C. Ruth and Calvin P. Horn Lecture in Western History and Culture at the University of New Mexico's Center for the Southwest. His talk was entitled "Art and Regional Identity in the Northern Rocky Mountain West."^[11]

His latest publication is Coyote America forthcoming with Basic Books in 2016.

References