Visited an extraordinary place in Oklahoma today: The National Cowboy & Western Heritage Museum. I thought it might be a little gimmicky, but it is a real gem – a serious collection of Western history, art, and culture.
Anyone with an interest in what the West was and is should stop here and take the time (at least half a day) to appreciate the thousands of paintings, sculptures, tapestries, maps, vintage clothes and firearms on display, and watch the hundreds of specially-curated radio, TV and film clips going back nearly 100 years. It makes clear that the appropriation and exploitation of the cowboy history had a huge impact on the early years of Hollywood and recorded popular music. That stuff had me engrossed: loads of crazy cowboy suits and boots as worn by Gene Autry, Rex Allen and Roy Rogers.
It is a brilliant primer too on Native American culture, with several galleries devoted to the art of indigenous American peoples. Perhaps its most famous exhibit is ‘The End of the Trail’, made by the sculptor James Earle Fraser in 1894 as a monument to what he believed was the ‘tragic dispossession of Native Americans’ at the end of that century. The piece itself refers to the “Trail of Tears and Deaths”, a phrase used by a Choctaw leader to describe events that forcibly and brutally removed most of the Native population of the southeastern United States from traditional homelands – begun by Andrew Jackson and Martin Van Buren in the 1830s. That’s the same Andrew Jackson whose spirit is currently being summoned by Donald Trump as support for his brand of neo-populist bullshit…
It’s a reminder anyway that the myth of the West is not only a rugged and romantic tale of man vs nature but often a true and sordid story of man vs man.
snowinginspace 