A hankering for history

SELF

PORTRAIT Date and place of birth: May 15, 1962, Muskegon, Mich.

Family: Wife Kay Pritchett In golf, I never thought I’d break 80, but this summer, I broke 70. It took 20 years.

My pets are Luna Lunera Cascabelera, an all-black cat who’s a tyrant, and Tupence “Tuppie” Twoshoes, the sweetest dog you will ever meet.

Current favorite read: a book by my dear friend Liping Zhu, The Road to Chinese Exclusion: The Denver Riot, 1880 Election and Rise of the West.

The movie I’ve watched the most: the ÿ rst Planet of the Apes. I’m intrigued by human evolution and the fate of humans.

When I was a kid, my heroes were teachers, priests, people I perceived as kind and caring.

My very first job was cleaning bathrooms at a service station for 50 cents an hour and busing tables at a restaurant called Princes.

The best advice I ever received was from my professor, Gerald D. Nash - to persevere in the face of obstacles.

And from Geshe Thupten Dorjee - to keep external forces/factors from determining how I feel about myself.

I consider myself a social justice advocate who cares about people - especially the plight of women, children and the oppressed.

Something you may be surprised to learn about me: Often when I listen to music I’m mentally choreographing dances to it.

My best tip for a budding historian: Read as much as possible, learn the craft thoroughly and don’t be lazy.

Talk to other historians and scholars in other ÿ elds.

Write history for a broad audience.

BENTONVILLE - Chris Huggard was a 20-something in graduate school when he got an idea for a book about a town in New Mexico that was eroded by decades of copper mining. What could make a more compelling story than the tale of massive dump trucks hauling out precious metal, secured when dynamite was dropped straight into the ground, covered only by a hat. And then there was the aftermath - decimated ground unrecognizable to the people who once lived there.

But the timing wasn’t right. As a young scholar, he was struggling to balance finishing his 500-page dissertation on the history of Grant County, N.M., with searching for a steady teaching job and life as a newlywed.

With that, the mystery of Santa Rita del Cobre got put on the back burner.

Dissertation done, the newly minted historian worked with parks services and cities to draft extensive histories of battlefields, parks and Arkansas towns.

It wasn’t until he was an established professor atNorthwest Arkansas Community College in Bentonville, with more than a decade of teaching experience behind him, that he returned to the book idea. At the suggestion of a local scholar, he began the bookwork by visiting someone who lived through the life and death of the town.

Pat Humble was a miner who also owned an antique shop in a town near Santa Rita. He was a nice guy who could speak of the history from a personal point of view, but near the end of their conversation he told Huggard to visit his son Terry, who, in his opinion, was the real historian.

“Terry grew up there [in Santa Rita], he worked in the mine for 30 years, and so he had this special local knowledge,” Huggard says. “He had always wanted a book on his hometown and he’d been collecting stuff since 1967.”

On the first of many visits to Terry and Artemisa Humble’s home, Huggard was greeted with a glass of iced tea and a couple of binders filled with photosand local records. By the time the tea glass was empty, Terry Humble deemed Huggard a trustworthy fellow, so he took him out back to the shed, which held company records, hospital records, school records, photographs and many documents that could help reconstruct the history of Santa Rita.

Huggard had struck the proverbial gold mine.

Here was a local man who had gone out of his way to collect items, transpose records from mining company archives and do his best to create a comprehensive picture of the town that could be easily forgotten. But Humble didn’t have the writing skills or the publishing connections. Huggard did.

Just a few months after Humble and Huggard’s initial meeting, they received a book contract.

RECONSTRUCTING A NON-EXISTENT CITY

In 2006, Northwest Arkansas Community College instituted a sabbatical program for professors. After resigning as honors program director, Huggard was awarded sabbatical leave to construct an environ-mental history of Pea Ridge, an area of Northwest Arkansas that had once been a Civil War battlefield. The leave of absence coincided with the book contract, and he found himself working on two hefty projects at once.

Huggard joined Humble at his home in January 2008, and the two began their research, writing and editing.

By the end of Huggard’s first stay, a matter of two weeks, the pair had organized the photos and documents, created an inventory and begun the first chapter of what would be an award-winning book.

“I started writing that first chapter in his little study and he was sitting nearby and if I had a question, he could look it up,” Huggard says. “He would read it and make comments … he’d name something he wanted to put in or some special local knowledge he had that would enhance the narrative.”

There would be many more of these visits, which Huggard looked forward to because of Humble’s good company, Artemisa’s fine Mexican-American cooking, and doing work that he enjoyed. Mornings were set aside for pure work and progress on the book, followed by afternoons of golfing, and evenings that began with dinner and carried on with editing the new pages. The chapters were so full of research that each began as a thick binder of assembled resources.

The two men split the work down the middle, making the teamwork a little nontraditional, but it suited them.

“I don’t think most academics would want to have a co-authored book. They want to do it themselves,” Huggard said. “In my case, Terry shared so much with me, it just didn’t seem right not to have his name on there.”

The final product details the labor issues, the mining industry and methods, the community and the effects on the environment. The manuscript was sent to two readers through University of Colorado Press and both deemed it worth publishing, with the addition of more information on the environmental aspects.

Huggard had gravitated toward environmental history while working on his doctorate, and in his contract work after he finished his degree. But when it came to the book, he had shied away from the subject, fearing he’d overlap data already published.

“So after that second reviewer said I should add the environmental stuff, I was like ‘Yeah!’ because that was my field and I was sort of holding back on that,” Huggard says.

Each topic took careful consideration for Humble, since the book’s subject placed him in the community spotlight, and issues like negative environmental effects and labor issues were controversial. Locals held their collective breaths for how their hometown would be portrayed.

In the end, Huggard and Humble produced a book they felt most accurately captured the now non-existent city that was home to thousands, including geologist, astronaut and former U.S. Sen. Harrison Schmitt.

“We had the goal of writing it that it would have broad appeal,” Huggard says, “not just written to academics. Anyone can pick it up, read it and understand it.”

And they succeeded.

In January 2012, Santa Rita Del Cobre: A Copper Mining Community in New Mexico was published. It went to a second printing two months later, and by the end of the year it had been awarded the Southwest Book Award by the Border Regional Library Association and the Howard Bryan Western History Award. This year, it received the Clark C. Spence Award, presented to the best book on mining history and named after a noted professor and mining historian.

“I don’t think I wrote the book with the idea of ever winning an award,” Huggard says. “You do it because you have a passion, you believe in this topic, it’s something you care about. It’s humbling and exhilarating.”

TEACHING ASPIRATIONS

Huggard grew up in Twin Lakes, Mich., where his family had been rooted for years. He had a scholarship to attend college in that state, but with his mother and four younger siblings’ recent move to Springdale, he missed his family and soon moved to attend the University of Arkansas.

In 1984, he earned a bachelor of science degree in education, focusing on social studies, but also had 33 credit hours in history - in essence, a double major. He continued master’s-level courses under renowned American West scholar Elliott West and wrote a thesis, “The Role of the Family in Settling the Cherokee Outlet.” The piece is near to his heart because his great-grandmother and great-aunt grew up there - the daughters of early settlers.

He wanted to be a high school teacher and coach, so he decided that certification in Spanish would be worthwhile. He studied abroad at Instituto Centroamericano International, the Institute for Central American Development Studies in San Jose, Costa Rica. He then began student teaching.

“B eing the idealistic 24-year-old I was at the time, I thought, ‘If you’re good at this and inspirational, they’ll participate,’” Huggard says.

More than indifference, Huggard was faced with a stinging defiance. Near the end of a class one day, he gave the students 15 minutes to read or sit quietly as he spoke with a couple of students. When he looked up, he realized that students had been shoveling class items out the window the entire time.

“Being someone who has to baby-sit like a tyrant, I couldn’t do that,” he says. “I could’ve, but I wouldn’t behappy.”

So upon earning his master’s in history in 1987, his professors advised him to earn his doctorate so he could teach college.

In no time he was studying with Gerald Nash, a scholar of the modern American West, at the University of New Mexico. Nash helped him through topics that at the time were fairly nontraditional in the historical realm - issues of race, class, gender and the environment.

Though Nash was exploring edgier topics in modern history, he still came at them from traditional angles, which gave Huggard a clear view of uncharted waters he could pursue in his budding career. Their professor-student relationship was an oddone. Brought together by a shared interest, they were eternally divided by contradicting opinions and values, something that challenged Huggard and still shapes his teaching style.

FRIEND AND MENTOR

In 1992, Huggard returned to the University of Arkansas, this time to fill in for a professor who had fallen ill. Once he completed his doctoral dissertation, he accepted an offer from Northwest Arkansas Community College.

There, Huggard settled in and felt at ease. He had students he could easily identify with and challenge.

“There were a lot of deficiencies in my upbringing,” Huggard says. “We were verypoor … people think of me as a professor who has a good life and all that. Most assume I’ve had these advantages my whole life.

“But as a teacher at a community college, it gives me deep insight into what students go through. I’m not just some guy coming off the street who had a silver spoon in my mouth. I know what it takes when you come from a background that’s difficult.”

At NWACC, Huggard was integral in forming the faculty senate and its constitution. He was elected the senate’s first president, later became faculty council chairman and the first honors program director.

He’s well liked because he is a friend and supportive mentor to students.

“Huggard kind of embodies what NWACC is all about, as far as putting students first and pushing to understand subject area,” says Eric Vest, director of academic advising at NWACC. “He has a great way of working with people. He’s able to push students a little bit and brings out the best in them.”

Bethany Hollis took an honors section of one of Huggard’s history courses to see if she would be interested in the honors program. She found the support and encouragement she needed.

“It was a discussion-based class,” Hollis says. “We had a lot of papers, tests were not a part of it. We really had to think about the material. He’s interested in quality projectsbeing produced and in students being happy with it.

“He’s not standing there looking over your shoulder or waving his finger at you, but he does expect you to put in the work.”

Josh McCandless earned a scholarship through a service learning project that Huggard was involved in, and he’s now pursuing a career to mirror his professor’s.

“He’s one of the best professors I’ve had,” McCandless says. “He shows you how to think for yourself; class is very interactive.”

His tendency to support others extends to co-workers also. When he’s not helping someone feel like they fit into the campus, he’s doing his best to make everyone else’s job easier.

“When I came into higher ed, he was one of the folks that made me feel welcome and really showed me the path,” Vest says.

April Brown, who followed Huggard as honors program director, seconds that.

“When I took over the program, it was easy to pick up,” Brown says. “He did a good job of making the honors program a presence on campus.”

Huggard continues to teach, mentor and write as much as possible. Currently, he’s advocating for more service learning projects, a hands-on environment that helps shape students’ world views and gets them involved in the community. He’s also working on a book on the history of Pea Ridge.