Wild Texas History is a digital exhibit I created during the pandemic told through primary sources from 1700 to 2000. It started with my search for the last jaguar in Texas and grew into a catalog of the wildlife that once roamed my state. By showing how wild Texas used to be, I hope to help people imagine how wild it could be again.
My interest in Texas jaguars led me deep into historical archives at the Briscoe Center at the University of Texas, where I found an unpublished image of the last cat killed here in 1948 (below). It also turned up lots of other information about Texas wildlife that I wanted to make more accessible for others. To that end I created WildTexasHistory.com, a digital exhibit of primary-source wildlife stories from 1700 to 2000 — bears, jaguars, ocelots, wolves, bison and more, organized by species and region. In all I wrote nearly 50 articles from primary-source material and compiled an extensive library documenting every known native jaguar in Texas. The project has since been cited in books.
That same jaguar research became a feature I wrote for Texas Parks & Wildlife magazine — "When Were the Last Jaguars Seen in Texas?" (Jan/Feb 2024) — and informed Deep in the Heart, the Fin & Fur Films documentary directed by Ben Masters and narrated by Matthew McConaughey, for which I did historical photo research.
As part of the project, I've been using Google Veo to bring long-gone Texas wildlife back to the screen — another way to make the archives feel alive.