MUSEUM OF WESTERN ART TO HOST BOOKSIGNING FOR GREAT WESTERN TRAIL

The Museum of Western Art will host a book signing with award-winning author Sylvia Mahoney’s new book, “Finding the Great Western Trail.” The book signing is free and open to the public and will take place March 18, 2017 at 2:00 p.m. “Finding the Great Western Trail,” published by Texas Tech University Press, is the recipient of the West Texas Historical Association’s 2016 Rupert Richardson Best Book of the Year, and was a finalist for the Will Rogers Gold Medallion Award in 2016. The Great Western Trail is a nineteenth-century cattle trail that originated in northern Mexico, ran west parallel to the Chisholm Trail, through what is now Kerr County, and traversed the United States for some two thousand miles, and terminated after crossing the Canadian border. Yet through time, misinformation, and the perpetuation of error, the historic path of this once-crucial cattle trail has been lost. “Finding the Great Western Trail” documents the first multi-community effort made to recover evidence and verify the route of the Great Western Trail. The Great Western Trail had long been celebrated in two neighboring communities: Vernon, Texas, and Altus, Oklahoma. Separated by the Red River, a natural border that cattle trail drovers forded with their herds, both Vernon and Altus maintained a living trail history with exhibits at local museums, annual trail-related events, on-going narratives from local descendants of drovers, and historical monuments and structures. So when Western Trail Historical Society members in Altus challenged the Vernon Rotary Club to mark the trail across Texas every six miles, the effort soon spread along the trail, in part through Rotary networks, from Mexico, across nine US states, and into Saskatchewan, Canada. This book is the story of finding and marking the trail, and it stands as a record of each community’s efforts to uncover their own local history. What began as bravado transformed into a grass-roots project that, one hopes, will bring the previously obscured history of the Great Western Trail to light. The book retails for $34.95. Museum members receive a 10% discount. The award-wining Museum of Western Art is open Tuesday through Saturday from 10 a.m. until 4 p.m. Guided Tours are available. For more information, please call 896.2553.