COWBOYS!

Wednesday, October 13

     Woke up in Oklahoma City, ready to go look for cowboys!!            

While eating breakfast we felt a jolt…..saw the building move. It was over as quick as it started. Did someone run into the building? Nope, no car/truck in the lobby. Earthquake? Hmmm. Everyone was looking around, so I know it wasn’t just us that felt that!  Later we found that there HAD been a 4.3 earthquake outside of Norman, OK.

WOW, we are getting the royal treatment on this vacation, all kinds of new things.

     We headed out to the National Cowboy & Western Heritage Museum. The building has a mural on the outside western wall of a herd of horses running with a cowboy on the lead horse. What a great way to mark the way. Unfortunately my picture did not turn out....but this one did. A bronze of cowboys meeting on the trail.

We had a coupon supplied by the lovely women at the Welcome Center (one of which sounded just like Nancy, Knute’s wife!). Image our surprise when we find out that it is FREE WEDNESDAY at the museum!!! We get in today for free!  

We are living a charmed life today!

     At the end of the entrance hall, bathed in light, surrounded by windows and a water feature outside, is a larger than life plaster statue called “End of the Trail” by James Earl Fraser. This is the artists’ depiction of the Indians being pushed towards the west coast, away from their native land, to California….into the ocean….the end of the trail.

Nicole tells me (Dayna) that art is what you make of it; sometimes it moves you while other people not so much. Sometimes all I can say about a particular piece is…..its art. This particular piece was calling me. I understood this one, I get it. It was hard for me to take my eyes off of the statute. It is made of plaster and apparently was in a park in California, children playing on it, when the museum found it. They negotiated with the town and finally came to an agreement, had a bronze made of it to give to the California town that had it and brought the original to the museum. It traveled in 3 pieces. There was some repair work that needed to be done, built a pedestal and it is now on display. This was in the 70’s?

The docent told us about the museum, where to start, and what not to miss. She did say I could NOT take the statue home…..drat!

At the east end of the museum was a larger than life plaster statue of Abraham Lincoln sitting, looking down.  Apparently the same statue in bronze is at the start of the Lincoln Memorial highway. We don’t know what part plaster plays in the making of bronze statues, but they are pretty cool looking. We watched the “this is how we got started” movie narrated by Tom Selleck. Then we got started looking for the cowboys!    We found John Wayne first thing!

This is so much more than just cowboys. There are paintings of the Wild West, animals, cattle drives, Indians, cowgirls, and cowboys. Statues, leather work, saddles, bridles, jewelry, clothing, headdresses, guns, dioramas, military life, rodeo, movies…. There is too much to see it all in 1 day.

There were several marble statues, at the west end of the hall was a larger than life statue of a cougar coming down the mountain. What a beauty! The pictures do not do her justice.

The displays of clothing and dioramas and the reproduction town, are all authentic. They used antiques, real Indian clothing and jewelry, bead work, headdresses, cowboy clothing, guns, military uniforms, and more than I can remember. They had a display of cowboy art, saddles, braid work, metal – bits and spurs – chaps. It is amazing to look at the detail even in the everyday items that were used. In the show pieces the carving on metal and leather was beyond what you could imagine, so intricate! No pictures were allowed in this section. Some of the pieces had price tags, some were several hundred thousand dollars!

There is a section dedicated to the movies and telling the story of the west, a large display just for John Wayne, one of the few people that personified the west without ever being a cowboy himself. His family donated a lot of his personal collection to the museum. There was a section on rodeo, a display of several of  Lane Frost’s things given by his family. He was a young rodeo star, bull rider, that died in the ring after being gored by a bull during a rodeo in Cheyenne. There was a movie that talked about how the west was won in movies, silent and talkies, how it was not accurate most of the time but made for a good movie. This was narrated by Sam Elliot…..it sounded great!

The gardens in the back have a beautiful waterfall that winds its way through the grounds, into little koi ponds, leading you around to see the bronze statues of people and animals, benches to sit and enjoy. Several animals are buried here, their past mascot Abilene the bull. Tornado the famous bull that was never ridden for the full 8 seconds in its career. And this tombstone for a good horse.

Even a restaurant, Persimmon Hill, the food was very good and they give you a lot of it for a little price! I did take a few pictures but mostly we walked in awe and enjoyed. We highly recommend going if you can. I would like to go back!  We went into the gift shop; they had 2 sizes of bronze reproduction of the statue “End of the Trail”. I would love to have one…..but not now, I’m holding out for the original! I settled for a postcard, and a Christmas ornament. I feel like I am leaving out so much, it was such a great place, that just means you have to go….and we have to go back!   David says there was much more than he thought there would be. If you go not a cowboy enthusiast, you will leave being one.  We didn’t leave until after 4 pm.                               

We are approximately 500 miles from St. Louis, MO.

We ended up driving into Missouri, I can’t remember the name of the town we stopped in…but they had a Waffle House!!  We went to dinner at Waffle house and had a ball. We joked with our waitress Shelby Shelby. Honest! That was her name! She was a riot. At one point a Domino’s pizza delivery guy walks up to the door, Shelby & I looked at him and each other and started laughing!!!  He asked her if he could plug in his GPS for a few minutes. I told Shelby I thought someone had ordered pizza, she laughed and said she had thought the same thing….it was pretty funny! I think it was one of those “you had to be there” moments. We left in a fine mood with a full belly.

We had such a great time, and had not eaten at any Waffle House on our whole trip, that we had breakfast there the next morning!! 

Yeah, we know.