On Friday, April 5, 2019 at 7pm at the Canyon Community Center, Southern Utah University Professor James M. Aton will be presenting a literary lecture on his newest book, “Crimson Cowboys:  The Remarkable Odyssey of the 1931 Claflin-Emerson Expedition”.

In 1931 a group from Harvard University’s Peabody Museum accomplished something that had never been attempted in the history of American archaeology: a six-week, four-hundred-mile horseback survey of Fremont prehistoric sites through some of the West’s most rugged terrain. The expedition was successful, but a report on the findings was never completed. What should have been one of the great archaeological stories in American history was relegated to boxes and files in the basement of the Peabody Museum at Harvard.

Now, based on over a thousand pages of documents (field journals, correspondence, and receipts) and over four hundred photographs, this book recounts the remarkable day-to-day adventures of this crew of one professor, five students, and three Utah guides who braved heat, fatigue, and the dangerous canyon wilderness to reveal vestiges of the Fremont culture in the Tavaputs Plateau and Uinta Basin areas. To better tell this story, authors Spangler and Aton undertook extensive fieldwork to confirm the sites; their recent photographs and those of the original expedition are shared on these pages. This engaging narrative situates the 1931 survey and its discoveries within the history of American archaeology.

Aton’s most recent book with Jerry D. Spangler, The Crimson Cowboys: The Remarkable Odyssey of the 1931 Claflin-Emerson Expedition (University of Utah Press 2018), won the Don D. and Catherine S. Fowler Prize for best book on anthropology.

James M. Aton has been Professor of English at Southern Utah University since 1980. He was a Visiting Fulbright Scholar of American Studies in Indonesia and the People’s Republic of China in 1989-90 and 1997-98 respectively. He is an award-winning author / coauthor of seven books on the artists, explorers, and rivers of the Colorado Plateau.

Thank you to the Town of Springdale and the Canyon Community Center for supporting this event

 

The Washington County RAP tax provided marketing assistance.

 

 

 

 

 

Funding was provided by the Community Foundation of Utah at the recommendation of Ms. Louise Excell and Mr. David Pettit.