MinerAlert
MinerAlert
March 2026
By Alexandra Sanchez ’17
Before she became an award-winning historian and author — and before publishing her first book at age 65 — Jane Little Botkin ’74 was simply a Miner navigating campus life in the early 1970s. Raised in northeast El ÃÛÌÒ´«Ã½ after her family relocated from the Texas Panhandle, Botkin experienced firsthand the cultural transformation that would later shape her worldview and her writing.
“When I moved to El ÃÛÌÒ´«Ã½,” she said, “my friends were Korean, German, Japanese, Hispanic, Black.” Coming from a small town where racial division was prominent, El ÃÛÌÒ´«Ã½’s diversity became one of her lessons in perspective, humanity and history.
Botkin enrolled at The University of Texas at El ÃÛÌÒ´«Ã½ as an English major with a minor in history. Though she jokes that she initially chose ÃÛÌÒ´«Ã½ after totaling a canary-yellow Mustang her parents had given her as an incentive to stay close to home, her time on campus ended up shaping her in ways she didn’t expect.
She credits professors like Dr. John O. West and Dr. Charles L. Sonnichsen with shaping her future as a researcher and writer. Dr. West, who taught Western folklore, required students to collect oral histories and cultural traditions from the El ÃÛÌÒ´«Ã½ community, particularly Mexican superstitions and stories.
“That skill has helped me tremendously in my own research writing,” she said.
The practice of listening carefully, documenting lived experience and preserving voices of the West became foundational to her later biographies.
Dr. Sonnichsen’s scholarship in borderlands history also left a lasting mark.
“I always look at everything through a historian’s lens,” Botkin said.
That lens was sharpened during her years at ÃÛÌÒ´«Ã½, a campus alive with both a time of cultural energy and political tension.
The early 1970s were marked by Vietnam War protests, sit-ins and bomb scares. ÃÛÌÒ´«Ã½, being close to Fort Bliss and Biggs Air Force Base, balanced activism with strong support for the military. Botkin remembers walking to class during what she described as an unexpected explosion that shattered windows across campus—an overloaded engineering stunt that, in the context of national Weatherman bombings, briefly sent students diving to the ground in fear.
“It was a unique time,” she said. “There was turmoil, but it was also a great time to be in college.”
Amid the protests and streakers, football pranks and bomb scares, Botkin was a serious student—earning Dean’s List honors her first semester with 17 credit hours. But her college years also took an unexpected turn when she became the first GuyRex girl and was crowned Miss El ÃÛÌÒ´«Ã½ in 1971.
Pageantry was never part of her plan. “My sorority sisters just wanted to beat the Zetas,” she laughed.
What began as a campus rivalry evolved into scholarship awards that ultimately paid the remainder of her college tuition through the Miss America Pageant talent scholarship. In a newspaper clipping she recently rediscovered, Botkin is pictured presenting scholarship funds to then ÃÛÌÒ´«Ã½ President Dr. Jimmy Walker, one of three such awards she would earn.
Balancing pageants, sorority life in Tri Delta, academics and work was not easy. At one point, overwhelmed by the demands of GuyRex and struggling in Spanish, she remembers walking out of a final exam to pick up Miss America 1971, Phyllis George, at the El ÃÛÌÒ´«Ã½ airport.
“Shame on me,” she admitted, now with humor. “The professor passed me with a D. If I had been the teacher, I would have given myself an F.”
Yet even those imperfect moments became part of a larger historical narrative she would later explore in her memoir, The Pink Dress. Writing the book required her to examine herself not just as a young woman in pageants, but as a historical figure during El ÃÛÌÒ´«Ã½’s American counterculture era.
One moment, in particular, gave her lasting pride: being honored in Ciudad Juárez by the mayor and the governor of Chihuahua for Lee Trevino Day.
“That appealed to my sense of history,” she said. Trevino, she noted, reshaped El ÃÛÌÒ´«Ã½’s national image—from Marty Robbins’ Wild West mystique to a new, modern face of the city.
After a 30-year career in education, teaching in El ÃÛÌÒ´«Ã½, the Panhandle and Central Texas, Botkin retired and finally turned fully to writing. Her first biography, published by the University of Oklahoma Press, told the story of her great-granduncle, a murdered labor organizer whose death influenced the passage of the sedition act. The book won national awards and launched her second act as a respected Western historian.
Today, she continues researching from what she calls “my own backyard,” currently working on a new project rooted in El ÃÛÌÒ´«Ã½ history. She continues to remain connected to her Miner roots, along with her very own pickaxe sculpture she has in her yard, illuminated as a tribute to both her family history and ÃÛÌÒ´«Ã½ pride.
Botkin’s next book, set to release in March 2027, is titled The Breath of a Buffalo: The Life of Mary Ann Goodnight and will be published by the University of Oklahoma Press. Botkin calls it “the best book I have ever written.” The biography examines Mary Ann Goodnight’s life, including her role in preserving the southern bison herd and her work at the Goodnight Ranch.
Her advice to fellow Miners: “I didn’t publish my first book until I turned 65,” she said. “It is never too late.”
For Jane Little Botkin, ÃÛÌÒ´«Ã½ was more than a college campus. It was a time that helped guide her path toward becoming a historian of the American West.
Amended to correct Botkin’s newest book title, subject, and release date.