The National Cowboy and Western Heritage Museum

On a hill in northeast Oklahoma City, in a building that looks vaguely like a mesa from the highway, sits the foremost museum of Western American history in the country. It was born from a specific, earnest fear that the story of the American West was disappearing.

In the early nineteen fifties, a Kansas City businessman named Chester Reynolds became convinced that the nation was losing its Western heritage. Cowboys were becoming a television archetype rather than a living memory. The men and women who had actually worked cattle, driven herds up the Chisholm Trail, and settled the plains were dying, and no major institution existed to preserve what they knew or what they had left behind. Reynolds lobbied for a national museum and started collecting cities that would host it. Scores of cities sent proposals. Oklahoma City won by offering land on a hilltop in the northeast part of the city, which they called Persimmon Hill.

The museum was incorporated on October sixteenth, nineteen fifty-five, as the National Cowboy Hall of Fame and Western Heritage Center, under the laws of the District of Columbia. The Oklahoma City facility opened a decade later. It has since grown to hold more than twenty-eight thousand works of Western and Native American art and artifacts, making it one of the largest collections of its kind anywhere.

The centerpiece is the Prosperity Junction exhibit, a reconstructed turn-of-the-century cattle town, and the sculpture court, anchored by End of the Trail, the monumental sculpture by James Earle Fraser, the sculptor who also designed the Indian Head nickel. The Hall of Great Westerners includes figures ranging from Sitting Bull to Will Rogers, from Annie Oakley to Sacagawea.

The Western art collection is serious: Frederic Remington, Charles Russell, and a broad survey of painters who worked the landscape from the Rockies to the Southern Plains. It is the kind of place you can spend a full day in and still feel like you skimmed it.