The National Cowboy Museum: Where the West Came to Rest

The idea for this museum began with worry. In the early nineteen fifties, a Kansas City businessman named Chester Reynolds grew alarmed at what he saw as the nation's fading connection to the story of westward settlement. He started a campaign to build an institution that would preserve and honor the men and women who had settled the American West. Oklahoma City won the bid by donating land on a rise called Persimmon Hill in the city's northeast quarter.

The National Cowboy Hall of Fame and Western Heritage Center was incorporated on October sixteenth, nineteen fifty-five, and opened its doors to the public in nineteen sixty-five. Since then it has grown into one of the most significant repositories of Western American art and material culture in the world, with more than twenty-eight thousand works in its collection.

The crown of that collection is the sculpture End of the Trail, created by American sculptor James Earle Fraser for the Panama-Pacific International Exposition in San Francisco in nineteen fifteen. Fraser grew up in the Dakotas and modeled the image, a Native American warrior slumped exhausted on a horse, at the age of seventeen. It became one of the most reproduced images in American art. The museum acquired Fraser's studio collection in nineteen sixty-seven, and the full-scale sculpture has been on permanent display here since nineteen ninety-three.

The collection also includes major works by Frederic Remington and Charles Russell, the world's most extensive collection of rodeo photographs, historic saddles, barbed wire, and the original paintings from the magazine Persimmon Hill, the museum's own publication. The National Rodeo Hall of Fame shares the campus.

This is not a nostalgic museum. It sits with the contradictions of frontier history alongside the romance of it, which is what makes the place worth more than an afternoon.