Rodeo Time

Van Horn had its 4H rodeo this weekend, a great event to show off young talent in this small community in the high mountain desert of Far West Texas!

Dorothea Lange is Good Company

Thanks to the Clark Hotel Museum, the University of North Texas Libraries' Portal to Texas History, and the Summerlee Foundation, photographs from Van Horn and the Texas Mountain Trail region are now available online. Click here to see the entire collection of 500 photographs at the Portal to Texas History website. This is just one of the photos in the collection; R.P. Bean's Ranch outside Van Horn.

We want the rest of the world know about our history and our photographs, basically spreading the word about the Texas Mountain Trail region and encouraging folks to visit us out here. So we contacted the nice folks at www.shorpy.com an excellent blog of great historical photographs and they were happy to post some of the collection from Van Horn's Clark Hotel Museum. When the photos were first posted yesterday, they were sandwiched between images from the amazing and legendary Dorothea Lange! Not bad company!

Shorpy.com also created a "Texas Mountain Trail" page of our photographs, so you can see them all together, here. The response has been tremendous. In less than an hour, our images had more than 60 "hits," and as I write this less than 24 hours after the first posting, the R.P. Bean Ranch photo has had 345 "hits!" With permission from the Clark Hotel Museum, the Portal to Texas History and Shorpy, we'll be posting more images of Far West Texas on this page in the future, and we'll let you know when they're "up" with a notice on this "On the Trail!" blog!

Our thanks to Ken at Shorpy.com, Dreanna Belden of the University of North Texas Library and the Portal to Texas History, the Summerlee Foundation, and Robert Stuckey, Director of the Clark Hotel Museum in Van Horn!

Update--a Shorpy reader wondered what the R.P. Bean Ranch looks like today. Yesterday, I drove 10 miles north of Van Horn on Hwy 54 (the road to Guadalupe Mountains National Park) and got as close to the ranch as I could without entering private land. While I couldn't get to the c. 1910 vantage point, I was able to take the second shot at the top of this post. You can see my correspondence with the Shorpy reader here.

--Beth Nobles, Regional Coordinator, Texas Mountain Trail