A Collector Like No Other

Historian Doug McChristian’s collection finds a home at Fort Concho.

- Jana Bommersbach

Of course, he’d become one of the frontier’s most ardent historians and collectors because history called early to Doug McChristian.

He’d always been a reader because his grandmother was the county librarian and his mother was a teacher—besides, his dad read those Western history books. But it was a family vacation visit to the Custer Battlefield when he was nine years old in 1956 that brought his love of reading and the West together—for his entire 71 years, he kept the handbook his folks bought him at the battlefield gift shop.

And then a second visit to the same battlefield as he was about to finish high school added the wrinkle that would define his life. He admired a park ranger and said to himself, “Now that would be the job to have, working where history happened.”