A City Within A City

I’ve learned lines cannot be crossed but connect together. As a girl from Louisiana, I didn’t know much about cowboy culture but when I uprooted myself and moved to Texas, I got submerged into the lifestyle of western culture. Hence, my presentation in Cincinnati was about bridging together the past, present, and future with oral history and the embodied of one girl’s interest turned into a digital humanities project that audiences will not forget.

Even being at this conference, the location was in the Hilton Cincinnati Netherland Plaza, and historic recalled as “a city within a city”.

Yet, My research is like learning about a culture within a larger culture of cowboys, rodeo, and life in western expansion of 2024. I wouldn’t trade this moment for anything as I traveled on my own dime for a greater cause to tell this story of one man, James Francies Jr and his dream to start the very first trail ride in Texas.

A trail ride is a group of horse-loving people coming together to travel to the Houston Livestock and Rodeo every year. The Prairie View Trail Riders is just one of 10 groups that travel every year and when I noticed all the other trail rides have their histories preserved, I needed to help capture this story too.

This is more than research to me, this is an untold story that needs to be told.

Link to my LibGuide to learn more about the history of the Prairie View Trail Riders here: https://pvamu.libguides.com/c.php?g=1341838