Peter R. Decker

Peter R. Decker was a professor of history and public policy at Duke University before becoming a Western rancher in Ridgway, Colorado. He served as Commissioner of Agriculture for the state of Colorado, is a director of the renowned National Western Stock Show in Denver, and served multiple terms on the Board of Trustees for Fort Lewis College in Durango, Colorado. He is the author of several books, including "Old Fences, New Neighbors" a book about the transformation of a Southwest Colorado community into a tourist destination; "Fortunes and Failures, a study of San Francisco's nineteenth-century merchants, and "The Utes Must Go!", the story of the expulsion of Colorado's first residents from the state. His two most recent works are fictional novels focusing on the lives of Easterners and their descendants, who chose to move west in the eighteenth century.