Buffalo Bill Center of the West
Cody, Wyoming
“Buffalo” Bill Cody made a name for himself in the 1880s by taking the sights and sounds of the American West to people throughout the country and around the world. In the process, he founded the town of Cody, Wyoming, where the Buffalo Bill Center of the West honors the man and the culture he helped to spread.
“We have five museums under one roof,” said group tour coordinator Debra Elwood. “We have one museum all about Buffalo Bill. The Plains Indian Museum talks about the tribes in our area. The Cody Firearms Museum will be going under renovation next year. The Draper Museum of Natural History deals with the Yellowstone ecosystem and the relationship between people and nature. And then we have the Whitney Western Art Gallery, with all kinds of historical pieces of artwork.”
The Buffalo Bill Museum features Cody’s boyhood home, which was brought over from Iowa, as well as exhibits about his Wild West Show, which toured all around the world.
“We have some artifacts from his Wild West Show, like a tent set up with his personal effects,” Elwood said. “The museum is packed full of his stuff. There are a lot of outfits that he wore in the Wild West Show, as well as a saddle and some other related things.”
Groups can arrange guided tours, chuck-wagon cooking demos and horseback-riding tours on the museum’s seven-acre campus. Many also choose to stay for the Dan Miller Cowboy Music Review, a long-running show in Cody that features dinner and Western music. The show runs through the summer in one of the museum’s auditoriums.
Autry Museum of the American West
Los Angeles
For three decades beginning in the 1930s, Gene Autry was one of America’s most famous “singing cowboys.” During his show business career, he appeared in 93 films and 91 episodes of “The Gene Autry Show” and was also an early influencer in the country and western music genres. It’s fitting, then, that his signature museum is in Los Angeles.
“Gene Autry, along with his wife, Jackie, created the Autry to encompass a broad representation of art and artifacts all about the American West,” said Keisha Raines, communications manager at the Autry Museum. “They founded the museum in 1988. They wanted it to be very different than other places. It’s not really about his life and legacy, but more about the history of the West.”
Visitors will still learn some about Autry in an exhibit dedicated to him that is part of a gallery that deals with Hollywood’s depiction of the West. But the museum is rich with other areas that deal with Western cultural heritage. One of the core exhibitions, “Art of the West,” deals with religion, landscape and migration in the West through artwork by famous artists such as Frederic Remington and Georgia O’Keeffe. A recently opened exhibition, “California Continued,” looks at the traditional ecological knowledge of the Native American groups indigenous to California.
Other highlights of the museum are a collection of Native American baskets, a customized Indian motorcycle from the 1940s and a re-created 19th-century saloon.
Casey Tibbs South Dakota Rodeo Center
Pierre, South Dakota
If you ever watched rodeo in the 1950s or movies about the West in the decades that followed, you likely saw performances by Casey Tibbs, a nine-time rodeo world champion who still stands out as the most successful rodeo competitor in the world. The Casey Tibbs South Dakota Rodeo Center, which opened in 2009, pays tribute to the South Dakota-born cowboy and other rodeo stars.
“We have a lot of artifacts from Casey Tibbs,” said Cindy Bahe, the center’s executive director. “He won his first championship at age 19, and no one has ever matched his record. We have a photo of the homestead where he grew up and a lot of pictures here from when he did stunts in Hollywood movies.”
The museum features a large bronze sculpture of Tibbs on a bronco at its front entrance. That statue is accompanied by a bronze of Mattie Newcombe, a famous female trick rider in the 1920s who the museum also features heavily.
“I call her a gymnast on a horse — she had to be very limber,” Bahe said. “We have her horse trailer within the museum as well as an array of her clothes and artifacts. We have a mural of her homestead that was hand painted and is about 60 feet long. There are also panoramic photos in there and information on her trick riding.”
Tibbs and Newcombe are both members of the South Dakota Rodeo Hall of Fame, which is housed at the museum. Other museum exhibits showcase the history and culture of rodeo in South Dakota.
