Mr. Michael Bennion

Mike Bennion grew up in Cody, Wyoming in the shadow of the Buffalo Bill Historical Center and spent most of his summers haunting that facility learning about the West. He served a church mission to Norway  and learned to appreciate World History and culture. He received his BA from Brigham Young University in 1977 in interpersonal communication and worked in as a retail sales manager for thirty years. During that time he dragged his family across the United States during vacations to various, museums, historical sites, battlefields and cemeteries. (His wife and daughter could tell of one stormy night in the Enfield, Connecticut cemetery during a thunderstorm.)

In 2009 Mike decided to begin a new phase of life, as a graduate student, to put his lifetime love affair with history to work. His interests lay especially in the Nineteenth Century American West. He has presented papers at the UNLV Phi Alpha Theta, Conference in 2010, the Southwest History Association Convention in Las Vegas and at the Mormon History Association Conference in 2012. He is a recipient of a Charles Redd Center grant to pursue research on Native Americans during the late nineteenth century. He also engaged in an artifact cataloging project at Rex Bell and Clara Bow’s Walking Box Ranch, just west of Searchlight, Nevada. During  this project, Mike learned the process of physically cataloging and accessioning museum collections, and interfacing the material culture with an on-line database.

He also conducts private client genealogy and family history research and teaches a continuing education class on the subject for UNLV. He is currently writing a client family history, as well as editing his Great Grandmother’s 1894-1932 diaries depicting life in Meeteetse, Wyoming at the turn of the Century.

Mr. Bennion has been the high school history teacher at American Heritage Academy for eleven years.