End of the Trail: The Cowboy Museum and What It Holds
Near Oklahoma City, Oklahoma
The sculpture at the center of this museum was first shown in San Francisco in nineteen fifteen, at the Panama-Pacific International Exposition, and it stopped people where they stood.
James Earle Fraser conceived the image in eighteen ninety-four, when he was seventeen years old, growing up in the Dakotas during the final years of the reservation confinement era. He had seen the aftermath of the battles that ended the Plains Indian wars. The sculpture he eventually cast shows a Native American warrior slumped over an exhausted horse, both of them spent, both of them at the end of something. He called it End of the Trail. At the Panama-Pacific Exposition it stood eighteen feet tall, the largest sculpture at the fair.
The image entered American visual culture immediately and has never really left. It appeared on posters, calendars, and commercial art for the rest of the twentieth century, widely reproduced, sometimes sentimentalized, always recognized. Fraser's original plaster cast eventually came to Visalia, California, where it deteriorated for decades in an outdoor park. In nineteen sixty-eight it was moved to Oklahoma City, restored, and installed in the building now known as the National Cowboy and Western Heritage Museum.
The museum itself opened in nineteen sixty-five, the result of a campaign begun in the early nineteen fifties by Kansas City businessman Chester Reynolds, who was concerned that the material culture of the American West was being lost without a central institution to preserve it. Oklahoma City offered land on Persimmon Hill and won the designation. The museum incorporated in Washington, D.C. on October sixteenth, nineteen fifty-five, as the National Cowboy Hall of Fame and Western Heritage Center, and it opened ten years later.
The collections run to more than twenty-eight thousand objects: paintings by Frederic Remington and Charles Russell, the world's largest archive of American rodeo photographs, barbed wire, saddlery, firearms, and a full-scale reconstruction of a frontier town called Prosperity Junction. End of the Trail stands at the entrance of the Payne-Kirkpatrick Memorial Building. You walk past it on the way in. Fraser finished the image when he was in his thirties. Oklahoma City has held it since nineteen sixty-eight.
