LARNED — The color yellow is a familiar hue for those who study history — aging documents, the vintage sheen of antique pearl and ivory artifacts, the changing tint of early photographs all take on a yellowed cast over time.
For Seth McFarland, the color of the sun has a different connection, in the historic trails he has chosen to study and document relating to the history of the West.
After four years as director of the Santa Fe Trail Center Museum & Library in Larned, McFarland will be answering the call of a different historic route. After Wednesday, July 31, he will be headed for the Dubois Museum, part of the Fremont County museum system located in Lander, Wyo.
“I’m going from the ‘Land of the Yellow Brick Road’ to the ‘Land of the Yellowstone Road.’ That museum is right on the historic Yellowstone Trail,” McFarland said.
A farewell reception for McFarland has been scheduled at the SFTC from 2-4 p.m. Sunday, July 28 in the museum’s West gallery.
Following the Santa Fe Trail
McFarland has harbored a special interest in trails of the West since the third grade. It’s not surprising, as he grew up in Santa Fe, N.M., and spent more than two decades and five stops at museums as either an administrator or community outreach coordinator.
In 2020, he came to Larned as SFTC director after spending seven years at the Palace of the Governors in Santa Fe. For his third museum experience, the position in Pawnee County was his first sojourn into Kansas.
Upon arrival, he poured his urban museum experience into the rural setting: creating new programs, reviving past events and enhancing several of the SFTC’s time-honored traditional gatherings.
“I hope that I’ve made a good mark,” McFarland said. “I hope that everything that has been done has been positive and good.”
Most recently, McFarland brought back the SFTC Summer Camp program for youth to experience the Trail hands-on. The four-day summer camp begins Tuesday, July 30 and runs through Friday, Aug. 2.
McFarland considers the role as an educator a large component in his historian paradigm.
“My interest in being an educator holds true, because as an educator, you should be learning yourself,” he said. “You make discoveries and then share them with others. That’s the fun part of working in a museum; there will always be discoveries and there will always be new ways to tell those stories.
“Everyone learns in different ways, so I find that being in a museum you get to tell those stories with the artifacts and the photographs and the documents that a history from a book doesn’t get to show.”
As the SFTC board begins its search for a new director, McFarland is busy tying up loose ends in his final week.
“We’ve had a very busy year; it’s been a great year so far,” he said. “We anticipate another great several months ahead with good activities planned for just about every month.”
The SFTC is looking ahead to its biennial Rendezvous, which takes place Sept. 19-24. While the Rendezvous is known for its deep dives into historic aspects of the Trail and the diverse cultures it involved, this year’s conclave will explore a topic never before covered.
“We’ve always centered on names and dates in the past, we’ve covered the personages and the different cultures,” McFarland said.
“But with this Rendezvous, we’re going to be diving deep into the psychological aspects that the Trails arrival had on the people involved.
“With its diversity of cultures, there are the continuing discoveries that are made. It’s such a wonderful history –by wonderful I don’t mean it was always good; I mean the ability to inspire wonder. “Our topic for this year’s Rendezvous is a pretty serious topic that hasn’t been covered. In that, there will be new revelations made. My experience with the Trail started off with a bit of naivete; I looked at the Trail as more of how it’s always been presented as a trail of discovery, a trail of international trade.
“That’s not the approach in how we are looking at it now, with the impact on the different cultures that were involved. It was an experience of the time. Those people back then weren’t looking at it in the same scope that we are looking at it today.
“We can’t criminalize them or punish them because of the way they were treating each other. But we have to look through the eyes of a historian in that we document that and at the same time moving forward, we don’t try and repeat some of those same mistakes.”
After the Rendezvous, follows the decades-old Tired Iron gathering in October; the annual meeting of the Historical Society in November; and “Christmas on the Prairie” in December.
“That’s not including the smaller events we’ve got going on,” McFarland noted.
“There is always going to be some loose ends, but I’m trying to wrap up the majority of those and make sure that this story and this history and this institution continues,” he said. “I fervently hope for their continued success.”
A full-circle find
McFarland wrapped up his Santa Fe Trail experience with attention to an artifact on display in the museum’s library unveiled at the previous Rendezvous.
“There are similarities in history regardless of where I’m living,” he said. “In coming here, I found similarities with New Mexico and I will find more where I’m going from here. People that were here, like Kit Carson, Fremont, Butch Cassidy, they were up there as well.
“We unveiled this pocket utensil at the last Rendevous. This brings things full circle for me,” McFarland explained. The pearl-handled tool was probably in daily use, as it contained a fork and a corkscrew, McFarland said.
“It was a pocket tool that was carried by Henry Mayer, one of the better-known traders on the Santa Fe Trail. It was an implement that would have been valuable to him daily. It can appeal to people on a number of levels, whether it is a culinary device, a tool, a pocketknife. It’s actually a piece of that history we can look at under glass and get a better understanding.
“It is these stories that have always interested me, ever since I was in the third grade. And actually getting to see a photo of the person who is long gone, but their tool is still here, that’s significant.
“We know that different forms of that utensil go back millennia, and we are still using tools very similar to that today.
“Pawnee County is very fortunate that earlier generations had the foresight to develop this museum and center it here, because it not only keeps local history alive, but it keeps international history going because of the connections with our country and other countries.”
