Herley wins award at history conference

“[The West River History Conference] are tremendous people who run a terrific conference. It is an honor to have been selected for the award and to represent Chadron State College while doing it,” said Herley, who hopes to present at the conference next year.

Herley said the paper, Deadwood Dick, Devils Nest, and the Doc Middleton-James Gang Connection that Relived the Wild West of the 1870s, will be available online at the West River History Conference website.

Herley said his paper looks at how Doc Middleton, sometimes under the alias Deadwood Dick, partnered with Cole Younger and Frank James to cash in on their old outlaw notoriety through a series of Wild West Shows performed in the early 1900s.

“How Middleton first connected to the former James Gang members is unclear, but suspicions have long existed that such activities and connections overlapped at a mysterious place on the Missouri River called Devils Nest,” Herley said.

Herley said the two-day conference attracts a lot of big names among North American Great Plains Scholars, educators, and historians.

“Renowned Lakota scholar Donovan Sprague gave a presentation on the 150^th anniversary of the Battle of Little Bighorn. That was a definite highlight. He was also honored with an award for his lifetime achievements. The keynote by South Dakota State Historic Preservation Officer Gerry Guan, also about Little Bighorn, was another highlight. Bruce Rosland, South Dakota Poet Laureate, spoke, and Paul Horsted, who has done some incredible photographic then-and-now history on the Black Hills, gave a presentation,” Herley said.

Herley encouraged CSC graduate students to attend or submit papers for presentation at the 2027 conference.

“It's a great conference with a different location each year usually, at most, three hours from Chadron,” he said. “It's a Western U.S. history-based conference, but they accept papers of all kinds for presentations. Attendees mostly want to listen and learn, but I would highly recommend some kind of visual aid or slide show to accompany students' presentations.”