| You can't get away in this town from William F Cody aka Buffalo
Bill. It appears that he was a very busy man. He started killing buffalo,
was a scout for the army, a showman of the first order, ran a wild west
show, and helped found the town of Cody. He did intend to be buried here but
ended up on a mountain-top near Denver. |  |
 | There are
numerous statues but this one stands outside the town's major attraction
(and possibly only good reason to visit here). The centre actually houses
five serious museums, the Draper Museum of Natural History, the Buffalo Bill
Museum, the Plains Indian Museum, the Whitney Gallery of Western Art and the
Cody Firearms Museum, the largest collection of guns anywhere, I should
think, including Gatling guns! The museums are modern, well laid out and
intended to be informative rather than just collections. |
| The Plains Indian Museum covers mainly articles from the Plains
Indians who roamed this area. Some of the artifacts are quite beautiful. The
workmanship (or should it be womanship) in this shirt belonging to Red Cloud
(a Lakota Sioux) was remarkable and must have represented hours of loving
care. |  |
 | But part of the
idea is to show that the traditions live on, so you have a traditional eagle
feather headdress next to this baseball cap which has been skillfully beaded
in the traditional style. Nowadays there is not the emphasis there was at
one time to make the native peoples conform to the white man's way of life,
but rather an acceptance that the traditional values and skills need to be
preserved. The increasing number of histories written from the native
perception also make interesting (and sometimes embarrassing) reading. |
| This was part of the inside of a log cabin; numbers of Indians
were made to live in such homes when on the reservations. Although they may
have resisted the style of living, the quality of the workmanship of the
items inside would put many of us to shame. |  |
 | The Plains Indian
Museum had a huge life-size diorama as a backdrop for film clips on
lifestyles at the time. The lighting here was well designed and enhanced the
overall display. |
| The natural history museum was very well laid out with the
displays rising in a spiral and showing the animals in settings proper to
the elevations they commonly roamed. This is a pronghorn antelope.. |  |
 | The Buffalo Bill
Museum has many artifacts from his era including wagons and the stagecoach
(fresh off the movie set). This was probably the Deadwood Stage and there
are exhibits that belonged toAnnie Oakley, who was part of his Wild West
show. |
| Most art leaves me cold as did most of the contents of this part
of the museum. This was just a sample but I found little I could get excited
about. |  |
 | The firearms museum
was just amazing. I never realised there were so many different
manufacturers and types. There must have been an example of every weapon
ever made. This was just one case of five display cases for one manufacturer.
There must have been two thousand different rifles, and I only looked at one
floor. I missed one completely. The museum was full of fathers and sons
extolling the virtues of each weapon. I'm afraid it did little for me but
then I don't come from Wyoming. |
| This is a tourist town with little in the way of shops for
anybody but tourists. And it has the usual collection of tourist traps, like
the local Rodeo. Not really my scene. But I have always been interested in
miniature modelling so this museum caught my eye, and for $3.... The
central display held a series of dioramas of historical scenes from the West
(including a couple of model railways that could be "driven" by the
visitor!).
I liked this collection of buffalo massing on the plains depicting the
way they impacted on life in earlier times. |  |
 | Then we had the
pioneer wagon train with the Indians circling around. Much beloved of the
movies but I suspect not quite so accurate in fact. |
| Around the outside was a large collection of Indian and local
history items such as you have in many museums of the West. I found it a
little disappointing although I accept that a lot of thought and work had
gone into it. I was left to contemplate the time and effort which had been
expended on the moccasins in this collection in one case. On an unrelated
note, this being a flat part of the country, we did get the bikes down and
rode into the town from the campsite. It only revealed how terribly unfit we
still are. But I suppose it was good for us. |  |
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