Position Papers

The various scholars' position papers follow:

Dan Flores, Hammond Professor of Western History at the University of Montana, is an environmental historian whose current scholarship concerns the interaction between Comanche and other Plains Indians and the buffalo, combining anthropology, biology, and history. He is the author of Canyon Visions: Photographs and Pastels of the Texas Plains (1989), Caprock Canyonlands: Journeys into the Heart of the Southern Plains (1990), and Jefferson and Southwestern Exploration: The Freeman and Curtis Accounts of the Red River Expedition of 1806 (1984). As an environmental historian, Flores' work combines disciplines.

William Goetzmann is a distinguished professor of American Studies at the University of Texas and an expert on visual representations of the Southwest. Dr. Goetzmann is best-known for his Pulitzer Prize-winning book The West of the Imagination (1987), which served as the basis for a highly-regarded public television series of the same name.

Thomas Hester is probably the foremost authority on pre-contact native bands of what is now the Southwest and has published numerous works on his various anthropological and archaeological studies of the Southwest.

Charles W. Polzer of the Arizona State Museum is the author or editor of such works as The Documentary Relations of the Southwest (1977), The Jesuit Missions of Northern Mexico (1991), Pedro De Rivera and the Military Regulations for Northern New Spain, 1724-1729 (1988), and The Presidio and Militia on the Northern Frontier of New Spain (1986).

Robert A. Ricklis of Coastal Archaeological Research Inc., Corpus Christi, Texas, is the author of The Traditional Roots of Native American Response to the Spanish Missions: The Case of the Karankawans of the Texas Coastal Zone (1991), and The Karankawa Indians of Texas: An Ecological Study of Cultural Tradition and Change (1996).

Eliseo Torres, Vice-President for Student Affairs, University of New Mexico, has done extensive research on the curandero tradition of folk medicine in the Southwest. He is the author of Green Medicine: Traditional Mexican American Herbal Remedies (1983), The Folk Healer: The Mexican-American Tradition of Curanderismo (1984), and several other publications.

Donald Chipman, who has studied the details of the journey, published his findings in a larger book, now an important text, Spanish Texas: 1519-1821 (1992). He is a professor of history at the University of North Texas in Denton.