The Buffalo Bill Center of the West

In 1883, Cody distilled these experiences into Buffalo Bill’s Wild West, a live presentation with real buffalo and Native Americans, stagecoach attacks, crack shooting from Annie Oakley, trick riding, and even reenactments of events like Custer’s Last Stand. For 30 years, the traveling show thrilled Americans who had never been west of the Mississippi and Europeans who had never crossed the Atlantic.

Cody defined the West in the public imagination with stories and images that have lived on for more than a century. Little wonder, then, that an institution bearing the name Buffalo Bill Center of the West declares itself “the best museum ever.” It may be.

Five Museums with One Theme

Located in Cody, Wyoming, the center is a seamless garment of five museums that enfolds visitors in the fact, fiction, art, science, myth, and majesty of the American West. Impossible to plumb in a day, there is something to please visitors of any age, level of interest, or depth of knowledge.

The Buffalo Bill Museum explores the life of Cody and his alter ego through possessions, documents, videos, interactive exhibits, and dioramas that place the viewer behind Buffalo Bill as he lies in wait for a nearby herd of buffalo. We follow his growth from a 14-year-old Pony Express messenger — he once claimed to have ridden 322 miles in 21½ hours — to a valuable Army scout, a mostly absent husband and father, a master entertainer, and finally a businessman who made and lost millions. We learn that Cody hunted buffalo like a Native American, killing only for survival and using every bit of the animal, and discover how he earned his name: He claimed to have killed 4,280 buffalo in 17 months, while hunting them as food for railroad workers building the Union Pacific line.

Many artifacts are connected to the Wild West show, including inscribed saddles used by Buffalo Bill and Annie Oakley. When the troupe performed in London for Queen Victoria, the sovereign is said to have been so charmed that she sent Cody a gift for the hotel he built in 1902 — a $100,000 cherry wood bar. Cody built the Irma, named for his daughter, to accommodate travelers to Yellowstone National Park on the Burlington Railroad spur that ran through Cody. The Irma, located five blocks from the Buffalo Bill Center, still welcomes tourists, and Queen Victoria’s bar is in the main dining room for all to see.

The Cody Firearms Museum features American weapons so finely crafted that they seem more art than armament. The museum traces firearm development from the early 16th century. Its 3,000 items include a collection of Winchesters and guns with a Hollywood connection as well as flintlocks, Gatling guns, and sport rifles.

Influences of plants, geology, and people on the West are explored in The Draper Museum of Natural History, in which visitors can take a virtual expedition through mountain forests and valleys. Budgeting limited time, I didn’t make it into the Draper, but friends with whom I traveled spent so long there that I was sure they were lost.

The Arapaho, Blackfeet, Cheyenne, Crow, Shoshone, and Lakota tribes are the focus of The Plains Indian Museum, documenting the cultures of those who have inhabited the region for thousands of years. The collection, which represents holdings from the late 1700s, covers the pre-reservation period to the present. As in many of the Buffalo Bill Center museums, dioramas put viewers into the action, enabling them to step into Native American history as the Plains peoples evolve from traditional hunting and gathering, to confinement on reservations, to the present struggle to preserve identity and heritage in the broader society. In one diorama, Now We Live In a House, visitors walk through a 20th-century home while hearing the owner explain what it was like to move from a tipi.

The Whitney Western Art Museum offers artists’ vision of the West, real and imagined, across time. The collection includes the work of Thomas Moran; Frederic Remington; and Alexander Phimister Proctor, the first American artist to sculpt a cowboy, for the 1893 Columbian Exposition. It was at the exposition that Proctor met Cody, who had brought the Wild West show to perform. There is also an installation of Frederic Remington’s studio, enabling visitors to see the many objects and garments he collected to give his work authenticity. Like many Western artists, Remington traveled the land extensively, but did much of his work at home — in New Rochelle, NY. It’s fun to picture Remington busily crafting Western icons just upriver from Wall Street.

Wander through the Whitney and you eventually come to a panoramic window that opens on Buffalo Bill — The Scout, a sculpture by Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney. The outdoor monument was erected in 1924, seven years after Cody’s death and three years before the Buffalo Bill Museum opened in a log cabin on the site.

An ongoing mission

In addition to the Buffalo Bill Center of the West’s five museums, there is the McCracken Research Library, which preserves rare books, original manuscripts, and historic documents and photographs. Together these facilities advance an understanding of the past, present, and future of the American West by safeguarding materials, educating and engaging the public, supporting inquiry, encouraging scholarship, disseminating new knowledge, and performing outreach through the web and traveling exhibitions.

Though with more academic rigor, the mission of the Buffalo Bill Center of the West is not so different from the task William F. Cody set for himself: to make these parts appreciated around the world.

Photos, top to bottom. (All photos by Pamela J. Forsythe, used with permission)

Buffalo Bill bust, from the Whitney Western Art Museum, Buffalo Bill Center of the West.

This woman’s shirt was valued for its elk teeth decoration. From the Plains Indian Museum, Buffalo Bill Center of the West.

A.D.M. Cooper displayed a prescient sensitivity to the plight of Native Americans in Viewing the Curios (1909). From the Whitney Western Art Museum, Buffalo Bill Center for the West.