In Search of Dominguez & Escalante A panel discussion and booksigning

Photographers Greg Mac Gregor and Siegfried Halus join State Historian Rick Hendricks and History Museum Director Frances Levine for a lecture and slide show about the 1776 Dominguez and Escalante Expedition at 2 pm, Sunday, April 17, in the History Museum Auditorium. MacGregor and Halus will sign copies of their new book In Search of Dominguez & Escalante: Photographing the 1776 Spanish Expedition Through the Southwest, published by the Museum of New Mexico Press.

This event, sponsored by the Museum of New Mexico Press, is free and open to the public.

On July 29, 1776, Franciscan friars Francisco Atanasio Dominguez and Silvestre Velez de Escalante began looking for an overland route from Santa Fe to the California coast. Although they didn't reach their final destination, the expedition is widely regarded as one of the great explorations in western U.S. history for its documentation of the land and Native peoples in the Four Corners.

The group—including cartographer Don Bernardo Miera y Pacheco—circumnavigated 1,800 miles of unchartered territory never before seen by Europeans, an arduous five-month trip documented in Escalante’s journal. 

More than 200 years later, Greg Mac Gregor and Siegfried Halus have created a remarkable visual record of the expedition. Using Escalante’s journal as their guide, the photographers followed the expeditionary route, circling through New Mexico, Colorado, Utah and Arizona, and documenting the frontier as first witnessed by the Spanish explorers on horseback.

Quoting widely from Escalante’s journal, the authors present firsthand accounts of the expedition alongside their photographic narrative. Essays by the photographers discuss their methodology and experiences as modern-day explorers retracing the steps of the friars. In an accompanying essay, Joseph P. Sánchez writes about the lasting legacy of the Spanish expeditions. 

The event's participants:

Greg Mac Gregor and Siegfried Halus are renowned photographers and educators whose works have been exhibited internationally.  Mac Gregor, professor emeritus of photography at California State University, is the author of Overland: The California Emigrant Trail of 1841-1870 (UNM Press). Halus is former director of the art department of Santa Fe Community College and the author (with Marie Romero Cash) of Living Shrines: Home Altars of New Mexico (MNM Press). 

Rick Hendricks received his B. A. in history at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and his Ph.D. in Ibero American Studies at the University of New Mexico. He also attended the Universidad de Sevilla in Spain. He is a former editor of the Vargas Project at the University of New Mexico. Rick has been a historical consultant for Sandia, Santa Ana, and Picuris Pueblos in New Mexico and Ysleta del Sur in Texas. After the conclusion of the Vargas Project, he worked in the Archives and Special Collections Department at New Mexico State University Library. At NMSU Rick also taught courses in colonial Latin America and Mexican history. He has written or collaborated on many books and articles on the Spanish colonial period in the American Southwest and Mexico. His most recent book, New Mexico in 1801: The Priests Report, was published in June 2008 by Rio Grande books. He edited the Southern New Mexico Historical Review, a publication of the Doña Ana Historical Society, for a decade.

Frances Levine holds degrees in anthropology: a Ph.D. and M.A. from Southern Methodist University and a B.A. from the University of Colorado. She has published extensively on New Mexico history and archaeology and is the co-editor, with Marta Weigle, of Telling New Mexico: A New History (Museum of New Mexico Press, 2009). Before becoming director of the Palace of the Governors, the state’s oldest architectural treasure, she taught New Mexico history and Pueblo and Hispanic ethno-history at Santa Fe Community College and was the Assistant Dean of Academic Affairs for Arts and Science.