Talk to be hosted on Santa Fe Trail in Goessel

GOESSEL—The Cottonwood Crossing Chapter of the Santa Fe Trail is hosting Dr. Leo Oliva, a leading expert on the Santa Fe Trail, who will present “Road of Con-quest: Another View of the Santa Fe Trail”, at 7 p.m. Thursday evening, Oct. 21, at the Goessel City Building. The pub-lic is invited to attend. Oliva became interested in frontier military history during the 1959 centennial celebration of the founding of Fort Larned and has been researching and writing about frontier military posts, western trails, and Indian-white relations ever since. A graduate of Fort Hays State University, he earned a masters degree in American history and a Ph.D. in American studies at the University of Denver. He is the author of several books (including “Soldiers on the Santa Fe Trail” in 1967 and six of the eight books in the Kansas Forts Net-work Series) and many articles about the Santa Fe Trail and the western frontier. He was editor of the Santa Fe Trail Association quarterly, Wagon Tracks, for 25 years and writes a weekly newspaper column on “Our Kansas Heritage.” He is a mem-ber of the Humanities Kansas Sneakers Bureau. He farms and re-sides in the Stockton, Kan., area. crossed the entirety of Marion County, east to west, and there are several notable trail land-marks found in the county including the Lost Springs campsite, Cottonwood Crossing, Durham Blowouts, and French Franks Road Ranche.

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