Wyoming Minute

The Draper Museum Raptor Experience will be 10 years old in 2021. In honor of its anniversary, Museum Minute is featuring the 11 raptors in the program. The Raptor Experience is a live raptor education program that shares the region’s wild animals with visitors to the Buffalo Bill Center of the West.

Hayabusa is a Peregrine falcon. She has a different injury than most of the other birds in the experience. Haya has ligament damage instead of a fracture that didn’t heal properly. 

Sally James Farnham was a sculptor from a prominent family in upstate New York. Farnham didn’t start sculpting until she was 32.

In the late 1930s, the U.S. Army selected the M-1 Garand as its new service rifle. But it turns out that it was quite a controversial decision. 

From 1922 to 1934, there was a college preparatory school for boys down the south fork in Cody. The Valley Ranch Boarding School was founded by Larry Larom and Winthrop Brooks. 

Charles Carey Rumsey was an American sculptor who is most well known for depicting polo players and equestrian subjects. He was a pretty well known polo player himself. But occasionally, Rumsey went down the Western theme, depicting bison and horses. 

The Draper Museum Raptor Experience will be 10 years old in 2021. In honor of its anniversary, Museum Minutes are featuring the 11 raptors in the program. The Raptor Experience is a live raptor education program that shares the region's wild animals with visitors to the Buffalo Bill Center of the West.

Museum curators are expected to have an in-depth knowledge of everything in the collections. 

“We try to put on a very good appearance of that when we give tours,” said Danny Michael, the assistant curator of the Cody Firearms Museum. “But it's not always the case.”

Vincent Mercaldo was a collector of Western imagery. But he was also a painter and an artist. Samantha Harper, the archivist at the McCracken Research Library, said he would manipulate many images.

The Draper Museum Raptor Experience will be 10 years old in 2021. In honor, the museum minutes are featuring the 11 raptors in the program. The raptor experience is a live raptor education program that shares the regions wild animals with visitors to the Buffalo Bill Center of the West.

Tommy Wayne Cannon, or more commonly known as T.C. Cannon, was Native American artist of the 20th century. He was an enrolled member of the Kiowa Tribe. Karen McWhorter, the curator of the Whitney Western Art Museum, said he played an important role in the development of contemporary Native art.

The color red is symbolic for many different cultures and movements. It has become associated with the Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women (MMIW) movement, which hopes to increase awareness of the violence experienced by Indigenous women.

In the early 1900s, a new concealable pistol was created. The Palm Protector Pistol was a double action revolver, but Danny Michael, the assistant curator of the Cody Firearms Museum, said it didn’t really look like a conventional revolver.

Samantha Harper is an archivist at the Buffalo Bill Center of the West’s McCracken Research Library. This job means that Harper digs through documents, photography and books every day.

The Plains Indian Museum doesn't only collect art from the past. Rebecca West, the curator of the museum, said their job is also to collect contemporary art like those of John Isaiah Pepion, of the Blackfeet nation in northern Montana.

In the past, natural history museums sent staff and researchers on expeditions to collect specimens in the field. But when the Draper Natural History Museum officially opened its doors in the early 2000s, it wanted to try to avoid that practice.

Museum curators often receive public inquiries, and sometimes an outside person can be very helpful to gaining better insight on a painting or object in the museum. For Karen McWhorter, the curator of the Whitney Western Art Museum, a call from a professor made her look at George Catlin’s “Mandan-View of the Missouri Above the Village Whilst the Women and Children are Bathing.”

During World War I, while John Browning was working on a heavy machine gun that would use a .50 caliber cartridge, Cody Firearms Museum Assistant Curator Danny Michael said Winchester got the Army contract to create that cartridge.

In the early 1900s, Charles Clarke was a southern California teen runaway who worked setting up bowling pins. But his life changed in one moment, said Eric Rossborough, an associate librarian at the McCracken Research Library at the Buffalo Bill Center of the West.

Museums don’t only collect unique objects. Sometimes everyday objects are just as valuable. This is true for the Plains Indian Museum. For Hunter Old Elk, the museum’s curatorial assistant, those are some of her favorite objects in the collection.

The Charles Russell painting titled “When Law Dulls The Edge of Chance” depicts two North-West Mounted Police or Monty's disarming two horse thieves. Karen McWhorter, the curator of the Whitney Western Art Museum, said the painting has had many different names and one of those included the phrase “horse thieves”

The Gatling gun is usually associated with the American West, but Danny Micheal, the assistant curator of the Cody Firearms Museums at the Buffalo Bill Museum of the West, said there is a unique history to the Model 1883 Gatling gun.

In 1900, Butch Cassidy, the Sundance Kid and other members of the Wild Bunch were in Fort Worth, Texas where they posed for a photo. Eric Rossborough, the associate librarian at the McCracken Research Library at the Buffalo Bill Center of the West, said the photographer hung the photo in the window of his studio.

Beads were one of the main products traded between Native Americans and Europeans. For museum curators and historians, the presence of beads on objects helps place an approximate time frame of when it was created.

Almost 25 years ago, wolves were reintroduced to Yellowstone National Park. Wolves originally roamed the Greater Yellowstone ecosystem, but, in the 1900s, they were wiped out. Settlers in the West poisoned and killed wolves in such high numbers that the animal was not seen in the area for decades.

Cars were first allowed in Yellowstone National Park in 1915, starting a popular new way to explore the park through auto tourism. In an effort to promote tourism in the park, artists were commissioned by auto tourism companies to help advertise Yellowstone National Park.

Tom Tobin was a mountain man and bounty hunter in the late 1800s in Southern Colorado. He is most known for killing the Espinosa outlaws. The Espinosas were tormenting the San Luis Valley in Colorado by allegedly killing more than 30 people. The brothers were killing these men as retaliation for relatives killed during the Mexican-American War. Ashley Hlebinsky, the curator of the Cody Firearms Museum, said the U.S. Army asked Tobin to capture the Espinosa brothers.

Did you ever think that Cody had a connection with the Boston Red Sox? Well, it turns out there is a connection.

Rosa Bonheur was a famous French animal artist during the late 19th century. She's one of the few female artists in the Whitney Western Art Museum collection. Karen McWhorter, the curator, said the collection has many more contemporary women represented.

When Leonard Cody Bell (not related) was nine years old, Buffalo Bill Cody offered him $10,000 if he would keep his hair long until he was 18. By the time Cody Bell was a teenager his hair was 58 inches long. 

Museums carry objects that unfortunately are not meant to last forever. Rebecca West, the curator of the Plains Indian Museum, said a Lakota sun bonnet in the Plains Indian Museum Collection represents how curators handle these pieces.