It's that time again! The Nall Lecture returns to WTAMU's Jack B. Kelley Legacy Hall this Thursday night, and this year features a study that was homegrown at our own Panhandle-Plains Historical Museum. In advance of the lecture, titled "When Did the West Become American? The Case of Zulu, Texas," we talked to Dr. Tim Bowman, the new director of the Center for the Study of the American West (CSAW), and unpacked the rich history that will be laid out in Thursday's lecture. To hear our full conversation, click the link at the top of this page.
ABOUT THE LECTURE (from WTAMU's Chip Chandler): In the late 1800s, two British-born adventurers bid farewell to an unsuccessful farming venture in Kansas and moved to the north Texas Panhandle to become commercial buffalo hunters.
James and Bob Cator, sons of a British naval officer, built a dugout in Hansford County. In time, it became a trading post that the brothers called “Zulu Stockade,” a name inspired by a war between British soldiers and African people halfway around the globe.
Nearly 150 years later, Dr. Andrew Offenburger, associate professor of history at Miami University, came across that settlement’s name around the 2019 release of his book “Frontiers in the Gilded Age: Adventure, Capitalism, and Dispossession from Southern Africa to the U.S.-Mexican Borderlands, 1880-1917.”
“It’s one of the things that stuck in the back of my mind,” Offenburger said. “After the book was published, I realized that I had let this linger, and I couldn’t help but start to dig into it and find out what was going on. How could there be a place called Zulu, Texas?”
That led Offenburger to West Texas A&M University’s Center for the Study of the American West and, eventually, to be the headliner for CSAW’s fall 2026 Garry L. Nall Lecture Series.
Offenburger will present “When Did the West Become American: The Case of Zulu, Texas” at 7 p.m. Oct. 15 in Legacy Hall inside the Jack B. Kelley Student Center on WT’s Canyon campus.
Admission is free. For information, call 806-651-2459.
Offenburger won a fellowship through CSAW to research the Cators—whose nephew, Marshall Cator, would later be regarded as one of the Panhandle’s legendary cowboys and cattlemen. In his research, Offenburger would find letters between the Cator brothers and their father back in England.
“(The father) was continually talking about the Anglo-Zulu war, and either the dad or the boys gave the settlement the name ‘Zulu’ because of the unfolding war and, supposedly, because the lands in Texas were as unsettled as the Zulu country in Southern Africa,” Offenburger said. “It really shows a multi-frontier mentality that a lot of settlers had. They didn’t get off the boat in the United States and suddenly become Americans to the core.”
That’s the key to Offenburger’s Nall Lecture, he said.
“When did the Panhandle or when did the American West become American?” he said. “For political scientists, it’s very easy to point to when states join the union. There are some very simple answers to that. But if you look at cultural history and the mindsets of people there on the ground, a lot of them didn’t consider themselves as staunchly Americans for at least a generation.
“I’ll be exploring that and suggesting ways that it might change how we understand the past and the long immigration process,” Offenburger said.
The Nall series, CSAW’s biannual signature event, was created to honor the exceptional service to WT and the scholastic accomplishments of WT Professor Emeritus of History Dr. Garry L. Nall.
The lecture series supports CSAW’s mission to promote the study of the American West. Each semester, CSAW invites a noted scholar to participate in a community lecture, classroom lecture, a question & answer discussion session, and small group outings with WT students.
“We’re thrilled to have Dr. Offenburger discuss his findings about the lives of the Cator brothers and their founding of the trading post at Zulu,” said Dr. Tim Bowman, CSAW director and WT professor of history. “His research through CSAW shines a light on an important family in Texas Panhandle history and how these British immigrants eventually came to consider themselves Americans.”
And, in fact, the Cators did adopt that new identity, and relatively quickly, too.
“I think for most of the first 10 years they were there, they were just working to get established and be safe,” Offenburger said. “Once counties in the Panhandle started getting established with courthouses and schools, that’s when these new identities really started to congeal.”
