A Rendezvous with History

Header Image: Camp along Santa Fe Trail, near present-day Great Bend. Illustration by Daniel A. Jenks. Library of Congress.

“It’s about time!”

That’s the response Dr. Leo E. Oliva received when the Santa Fe Trail Center  in Larned announced the theme of their annual Rendezvous symposium: “Road of Conquest: Another View of the Santa Fe Trail.” This three-day event, supported by a Humanities for All Grant, seeks to provide scholarly information to a public audience and delve deeply into overlooked stories of the Santa Fe Trail.

According to Dr. Oliva, a scholar and organizer of the symposium, most Americans have never heard of the Doctrine of Discovery, even though it was the guiding principle of the Age of Discovery and westward expansion in the United States. It was the concept that if a European explorer discovered territory previously unknown to Europeans, the discoverer’s nation could lay claim to that territory—even if other people already lived there. The Rendezvous symposium will explore how the legacy of that doctrine is still felt today.

Most of the stories we tell about the Santa Fe Trail—described as “America’s first commercial highway”—come from a colonial perspective, but this year’s Rendezvous works to correct that with a vibrant panel of Native American and Hispanic American scholars from Kansas, Arizona, New Mexico, Colorado, and Oklahoma. These scholars—two of whom have authored Pulitzer-Prize-finalist books—will reexamine and reinterpret history to capture a fuller picture of the trail.

The symposium consists of a documentary screening and presentations by each scholar, covering topics including “disease, commerce, treaties, military conquest, missionaries and mission schools, colonialism, and the Euro-American occupation of former Indigenous lands.”

For one of his two presentations, Dr. Oliva will tell the story of the American buffalo, which was a crucial resource to many Native peoples until the 19th century. Government officials promoted buffalo slaughter as a way of controlling the plains tribes who depended on buffalo for their livelihoods. In 1840, there were an estimated 40 million buffalo on the great plains. By 1880, there were only about one thousand remaining.

Over the course of the weekend, visitors will learn this story and many others to contextualize the present and understand how it has been shaped by the past.

“Road of Conquest: Another View of the Santa Fe Trail” will be held September 19-21, 2024. For more information or to register for the event, visit https://santafetrailcenter.org/upcoming-events/.

Join the Movement of Ideas

• ATTEND Rendezvous 2024, “Road of Conquest: Another View of the Santa Fe Trail” September 19-21, 2024. Find details and register.

• BRING Leo Oliva to your community 

  to present his Speakers Bureau topic, "Railroaded: The Industry That Shaped Kansas.”

• WATCH the trailer for “The Road to Santa Fe,”  a documentary supported by Prairie Hollow Productions and the Flint Hills Discovery Center that looks at the history of the trail and its impact on Indigenous populations.