The Gilcrease Museum and the Man Who Collected America
Near Tulsa, Oklahoma
Thomas Gilcrease was born in Louisiana in eighteen ninety to a family with Creek Nation allotment rights. When the Dawes Act apportioned land to individual tribal members in the early nineteen hundreds, Gilcrease received an allotment of one hundred sixty acres in what would become Creek County, Oklahoma. In nineteen oh five, oil was discovered on that land.
He used the money to collect. Over the course of four decades, Thomas Gilcrease assembled what is now considered the largest and most comprehensive collection of art and artifacts related to the history of the American West and the indigenous peoples of North America. He bought paintings by Frederic Remington, Charles Russell, and Thomas Moran. He acquired Spanish colonial manuscripts, Cherokee scrolls, Civil War documents, and artifacts from civilizations that had been reduced to artifacts within living memory of some of his sellers. By the nineteen fifties, he had accumulated more than ten thousand works of art and more than eighty thousand artifacts and archival items.
He also ran out of money. In nineteen fifty-four, facing insolvency, Gilcrease offered to sell the collection to the city of Tulsa. The city voted to purchase it by referendum, approving a bond issue of two and a quarter million dollars. Tulsa's citizens voted to tax themselves to keep their neighbor's collection in their city. The collection stayed. The museum bearing Gilcrease's name sits on a hill northwest of downtown, on the land he once owned, surrounded by the same red-clay Osage Hills terrain where Creek allottees had been farming when the oil men arrived.
The institution now holds some of the most important documentary materials for understanding the encounter between European and Native American civilizations across four centuries. Gilcrease himself, a Creek citizen who became a millionaire from oil and spent his wealth on history, is one of the more unusual figures the American West produced.
