Hunting the American West Section of the National Cowboy & Western Heritage Museum in Oklahoma City
10https://www.theamericansouthwest.com/national-cowboy-and-western-heritage-museum The National Cowboy & Western Heritage Museum in Oklahoma City is an amazing museum filled with beautiful artwork, breathtaking sculptures, an outdoor American Southwest recreation (Liichokoshkomo’), and tons of information on the American West, the Cowboy, the Indian, and our awesome history. The museum features many halls and exhibits including one on the American Cowboy, the American Rodeo, Art of the American West, Western Films and their stars, Firearms, the Frontier, a room full of Barbed Wire, American Indian Art, an old frontier town recreation known as Prosperity Junction, and so much more. If you find yourself in Oklahoma City, this is a must visit.
Adult: $15. Child: $5. Student: $10. Recently the museum has finished the Liichokoshkomo’ outside area complete with a Trading Post, a canyon with pictographs & petroglyphs, Monument Valley style buttes, and an Anasazi/Ancestral Puebloan alcove house similar to Mesa Verde. There’s also a Navajo Hogan and structures used by the Pawnee, Kiowa, Caddo, and Chickasaw Indians. The museum calls this area of Liichokoshkomo’ the Intertribal Village. But there’s also a train depot, a prairie sod house, an Oil Derrick, and plenty of sculptures.
Inside the Prosperity Junction Western Town area there’s a jail cell, a saloon, dentist office, portrait studio, the stables, a church, and a lot more. It’s fun to imagine what the past may have looked and sounded like. Besides the old town though, there’s also a section describing the history of Cowboys from the Old World to the New. There’s a section on big game hunting and buffalo hunters. There’s a section highlighting the mountain men of the old west as well as the influence of the Spanish on the area.
The fine arts section of the museum features amazing works by some of my favorite artists. Painters and sculptors like William Robinson Leigh, Frederic Remington, Charles Marion Russell, Albert Bierstadt, and a whole lot more. There’s also the amazing End of the Trail and the Canyon Princess. Another new addition to the museum is the entrance to the West wing. It was created by the same artists who made the interactive Van Gogh Experience and it is fantastic. It’s the perfect introduction to the American West.