Yellowstone
was a bust…well that’s what you get when you visit in the bizarre off-season
the region has between the busy summer and winter seasons. One thing I found
frustrating about touring the US (and something that helped prompt this blog) is
that there really is no central hub for tourist information. You need to either
know exactly where you want to go and what it is you want to see and what
questions you need to ask, or else you could be left out in the cold…so to
speak.
Case in
point. I spent weeks investigating this trip to Yellowstone National Park and
nowhere, and I mean nowhere, does it mention you cannot drive through from the
north entrance at Gardiner to Cooke City. Certainly it says many roads can be
closed, and how impossible it is to get to certain features in the park during
winter without snowmobiles or other snow traveling vehicles, but when we
arrived it was still a month before winter began. Yet there was no sign, no
message, not even a cheeseboard mentioning don’t drive down this road as it was
closed. Luckily, I asked at the main ranger station inside the park before we
headed towards the interior and ruined an entire day, or worse, got stuck.
Getting back
on point about a central information hub for US tourism, nowhere could I find
information warning me that, during the last months of autumn, many tourist
destinations, including hotels by the way, are closed until the start of winter
and the snow season. If you’re traveling north during late October/early
November, you need to meticulously go through each and every destination and
location you will be traveling too, INCLUDING all the roads between these locations
to ensure you can physically travel. Google Maps was of some help in this
planning as it did occasional come up with a warning that a certain road may be
closed, but its Google maps, so always take this information with a grain of
salt and follow up on anything it tells you.
Driving through
the sleepy town of Cody towards a snow capped mountain, you quickly come across
the town’s current claim to fame (maybe that’s overstating it, how about
current reason for visiting), the Buffalo Bill Historical Centre.
Having just
undergone a rather expensive facelift and reopening in 2012, the centre isn’t
actually a single entity but a number of organisations under the same roof. Of
interest to us here is the Draper Museum of Natural History, and for the life
of me I cannot recall how I’d heard about the museum- but I was quickly thankful
that I’d made the effort to visit.
The Buffalo
Bill Historical Centre is damn impressive. The place is huge, with a large log cabin
welcoming visitors into the natural history section- an entire cabin, and
that’s only the entrance. The Wyoming outdoor hall of fame has some very
unusual displays, from rustic homemade furniture to an amazing chandelier made
from (what I assumed was) elk horns. At first I was disturbed how many animals
had died for such a piece, but the display explains elk and deer lose their
horns every year, and though some may have been from hunted animals, most of
the antlers had simply been picked up off the ground after mating season.
Greater
Yellowstone Natural History Hall
Next is a
series of life-like displays depicting animals from the local region. Bears
fighting ferocious wolverines and big horn sheep climbing fantastic mountain
displays lined the entrance of something spectacular. Dropping away is what I
can only describe as a large, spiralling corridor (as its far too big and grand
to be called a stairwell), which ends several floors below at a large,
illuminated map of the region.
As you wind
your way down you enter little side corridors with each containing lifelike displays
to walk through. Reconstructed forests with owls, stouts, bobcats, hornets
nests, moose, fly-fishing, parts of rivers- with some items along the roof or buried in the
floor with plexiglass flooring that you walk across.
This long
descent ends in a big display on the geology of Wyoming- a place as many of us
know renowned for its dinosaur fossils. Here are dinosaur footprints and a
large reconstructed rock canyon with dinosaur bones and a raptor running across
the top. It’s not just dinosaur’s either, there’s a nice sabre-tooth skeleton bounding
down at you from the top of one display, along with mammoth and human remains. There’s
also a display of fossils from the nearby Green River formation, including
fish and stingrays.
This is all
great, but the single display that really makes this part of the museum world
class is the rock wall running along one entire end of the hall. At least two
(maybe three) floors high, this reconstructed cliff has a replicated fossil dig
at the base, with various levels revealing how palaeontologists and anthropologists
find and catalogue fossils. And what bones were they digging up?
Hanging
above your head, as though falling off a cliff to their death, is a plummeting bison
herd. This amazing piece is unlike anything I have seen in any natural history
museum I’ve ever visited and verges more on art than display. Standing under
this piece is both awe inspiring and intimidating.
To return to
the ventral entrance you next walk through a few subterranean corridors that
house the Buffalo Bill Collection. If you like the Old West, this is the place
for you as there’s gunfighter paraphernalia, wagons, old saddles and a large library
where you can research the history of the west.
Plains
Indians Museum
Containing
items from Plains Tribes such as the Arapaho, Lakota, Crow, Cheyenne, Blackfeet
and Pawnee, the second part of the historical centre is the Plains Indian
Museum. Once again this is a huge building, the size of an airplane hangar.
One
corner has a native tipi, with walls strewn with the most magnificent native
art- most on cured animal hides. War bonnets, weapons and the general instruments
of native life making for great viewing, but like earlier this remarkable
museum steps things up a notch. When you turn a corner and enter what looks
like an IMAX theatre, one wall has been left blank to allow images and movies
to be projected on a western scene.
Before this is a life-scene from the Plains
Indians (a word I generally don’t like to use by the way, but it’s the one the
museum itself uses), with various parts of the display highlighted or darkened
as a multi-media story unfolds all about you. This is really good fun and a nice
and clever way of educating the general public.
One thing
that caught my interest was the display of native artefacts from the Battle of
the Little Bighorn. There is a lot of this stuff at a number of museum’s so I’m
not 100% certain the significance of these pieces. If they are the real thing,
then WOW, but if they’re pieces with what you could call peripheral influence
(items from the tribes but not owned by individuals who’d actually participated
in the battle), then nice, interesting and great to see, but the fact that I left
this display with questions may mean a little more scripting may be needed
here.
The display
ends at a frontier log cabin and (if memory serves me) a native sweat-lodge
that you can walk in and again watch a multimedia display…I did mention this
place is big!
As an
Australian I would say the only thing missing was someone, somewhere in the
display I could talk too. It sounds strange, but I met very few Native Americans
in my three years in the US and would have loved the opportunity to chat and
ask some questions. To be fair though, we were there during the off season
leading up to winter and most places in the north were either closed or
understaffed before the on season rush, so they may have people in there during
these times.
Whitney
Gallery of Western Art
The third section
of this complex is the Gallery of Western Art. Hanging on the walls here are
numerous paintings and statues of the quintessential western scenes.
Cowboys,
cattlemen with columns of longhorns being driven across a grassy plain, frontiersmen
fighting wild animals, wild animals in majestic poses in majestic scenery,
natives either suffering or living a free life, here you’ll see all this. Many
of these images are famous so are likely from quality artists, I just didn’t
know any of them.
This gallery
ends in one of the most picturesque windows you will ever see which creates a
living painting showing the seasonal changes of an actual western landscape.
During our visit we got to see a snow covered plain with white peaked mountains
in the distance. Fantastic, and again a very clever use of space.
For any fan
of the West Wing, you’ll likely remember there was always a statue of a frontiersman
astride a bucking horse in the Oval office. ‘Rough Rider’ is a statute built by
famed western artist, Frederick Remington, and the gallery contains many fine
examples of his work, both in statue form and paint. They have even rebuilt Remington’s
workshop in one corner, a brief look into the workroom of a true artist.
Cody
Firearms Museum
The fourth
and last gallery was a real eye opener and brings home the struggle the US is having
today after the recent tragedies in that country. The love affair American’s have with guns goes
back a long way and is well and truly ingrained into many parts of the nation’s
society. This is most obvious in the Cody Firearms Museum where there are
thousands, and I do mean thousands of weapons on display.
These guns are sorted
into makers, time and conflicts, hand guns, rifles and machine guns. Row after
row of guns, walking you through the history of the United States and the weapons
they used to define the nation today.
Their fights against the natives, the
French, the British, the Germans, Cuba, Mexico, drug runners, beasts and birds,
the mob- the guns on display were truly amazing.
What was
somewhat disturbing was the hunting lodge that takes up one end of this
display. Inside hang dozens of animals heads, though most if not all were
antlered beasts from the American west. I don’t recall there being a bear or
cougar- perhaps seeing one of these beasts dead would have been one step too
far for visitors.
“We believe
in a spirit, definable and intellectually real, called ‘The Spirit of the
American West.'”. This is the unifying theme of all five museums and it’s hard
to disagree as they do seem to cover everything. In conclusion, for a museum
that wasn’t really on our itinerary and we had really no reason to visit, the Buffalo
Bill Historical Centre turned out to be a true gem and worth the drive if you
find yourself visiting Yellowstone National Park.
