Location: Center of Southwest Studies Lyceum, Free and Open to the Public
In this year of the 150th anniversary of La Plata County, author and historian Andrew Gulliford will provide an overview of the women, men, and places unique to La Plata County since its inception in 1874. Gulliford will tell tales of Buffalo soldiers, female jackpackers, prospectors, miners, gunslingers, farmers, ranchers, and businessmen who started railroads, restaurants, and banks. He will discuss a toll road, the start of the U.S. Forest Service, a famous murder, and the long shadow of the Ku Klux Klan. He will describe our evolution from being a rural and remote agricultural and industrial county to a tourist and mountain bike mecca with second homes, a four-year college, and a growing economy. The audience can ask questions, tell stories, and help speculate on the next 150 years of our outstanding Colorado county.
More about Dr. Andrew Gulliford...
Andrew Gulliford is a professor of history and Environmental Studies at Fort Lewis College in Durango, Colorado where he has been awarded the Roger Peters Distinguished Faculty Award for teaching, research, and service. Gulliford teaches popular courses on wilderness, national parks, Western history, Colorado history, and environmental history. He is the author of America’s Country Schools, Sacred Objects and Sacred Places: Preserving Tribal Traditions, and Boomtown Blues: Colorado Oil Shale, which won the Colorado Book Award. He edited Preserving Western History, which was voted one of the best books on the Southwest by the Tucson-Pima County Library. His book Outdoors in the Southwest: An Adventure Anthology won the Arizona/New Mexico Book Award in the category of nature/ environment and Best Book on Arizona, as well as the Colorado Book Award for best anthology. Gulliford edited The Last Stand of the Pack: A Critical Edition, about wolves in Colorado, which was published by the University Press of Colorado.
His book The Woolly West: Colorado’s Hidden History of Sheepscapes, published by Texas A&M University Press, was chosen the Outstanding Nonfiction winner for the Wrangler Western Heritage Awards sponsored by the National Cowboy & Western Heritage Museum in Oklahoma City. It also won the Colorado Book Award for history. His latest book, Bears Ears: Landscape of Refuge and Resistance from the University of Utah Press, received the Best Book in Utah History Award from the Board of State History at the Utah Historical Society.
Dr. Gulliford has been awarded the National Individual Volunteer Award from the U.S. Forest Service for wilderness education, and a certificate of recognition from the Secretary of Agriculture for “outstanding contributions to America’s natural and cultural resources.” For a decade he held a federal appointment to the Southwest Colorado Resources Advisory Council of the Bureau of Land Management. He was also appointed by the governor to the Colorado Historic Preservation Review Board. He has served on the Mesa Verde Foundation, currently is a trustee for the Colorado Historical Foundation, and he chairs the La Plata County Historical Commission.
Gulliford writes columns about Colorado for the Durango Herald and the Cortez Journal, and he has written for the annual publication History La Plata. With his Durango Herald column “Gulliford’s Travels” he took 1st place for a news column in the 2023 Top of the Rockies Journalism Contest sponsored by the Colorado Chapter of the Society of Professional Journalists. Dr. Gulliford also appears in history programs for “The Colorado Experience” television series produced by Rocky Mountain PBS.
Gulliford_a@fortlewis.edu
website: andrewgulliford.ne