Mick’s Missives #1, Wed. July 8, 2020
Well, I have been telling myself for years that I am going to start blogging and try to keep up a bit more of an exciting website. Today I am making good on that aspiration. Here, then, is the first of what I am sure will be an irregular series of commentary, observations, and maybe a story here and there. I am calling it Mick’s Missives for now. It is probably only coincidental that I finally step off on this path at the same time my first book, XIT: A Story of Land, Cattle, and Capital in Texas and Montana, is nearing its publication date, October 22, 2020. Well, maybe a little. It is being published by The University of Oklahoma Press and I am pretty proud of it. I’ll write here occasionally on the research I did on Texas’s state capitol in Austin and the payoff for that beautiful structure, the XIT Ranch in Texas Panhandle. The book tries to tell a big story, but it is a big story to tell. There is quite a lot on the cutting room floor that I can still use as content here. But enough of all that. Let’s get this party started.
First of all, why should you care about reading this? I don’t know, but maybe if I tell you a bit about myself, it’ll break the ice. Importantly, I was born and spent my formative years in Montana. The story of how I’ve spent the last thirty-five years elsewhere is long, usually tedious, sometimes hilarious, and will also sometimes be a topic here. The last twenty-eight of those thirty-five years have been spent in North Texas making a living and raising a family. Texas, too, will warrant comment here, perhaps more frequently than some will like. History has enamored me throughout my life, but my career as a professional historian is just the latest in a variety of vocations I pursued throughout my life. I guess, over time, it took about thirteen cumulative years of higher education to obtain a doctorate. As an undergraduate years ago, I focused my attention on more Eurocentric history – the English and French, Napoleon, diplomatic history, even military history. At the time, I told myself I knew what I needed to know about the United States’s history — Texas’s and Montana’s, too. I was wrong, of course, and I now know I will never know enough.
