American West

African American history in the American West goes back hundreds of years, but not a lot of that history made it into the history books, and many stories are at risk of getting lost in time.

A museum in Denver is working to salvage them before that happens. Wyoming Public Radio's Melodie Edwards sat down with the Black American West Museum's re-enactor guild when they came to Laramie's Higher Ground Fair. She wanted to find out about each of the characters they portrayed in full costume on stage at the fair.

If you are a Wild West film fan, then you've probably seen Winchester '73, True Grit and High Noon. Besides being films about the West, all of these films also feature a Winchester Model 1873 rifle. The carbine has widely been credited as being the gun that won the West. Danny Michael, the assistant curator at the Cody Firearms Museum, said the history might be a little iffy on whether the rifle really won the West, but it still may have had an impact.

Most people know John Wesley Powell as the first man to travel through the Grand Canyon. However, as author of The Promise of the Grand Canyon: John Wesley Powell’s Perilous Journey and His Vision for the American West, John F. Ross found out that adventure inspired Powell to re-envision water usage in the West. 

Western films are iconic like Stagecoach, The Magnificent Seven and High Noon. But has the Western genre lost its popularity in the modern days of the Avengers and superheroes? Wyoming Public Radio's Kamila Kudelska asked film critic, Dr. Andrew Patrick Nelson, whether the genre is really dying or just changing?

A specific western furniture style was born in Cody in the 1930s. And for the past 30 years, its biggest fans have tried to spread it beyond the West by holding annual furniture expositions around the northwest Wyoming city. The style in question is an old-west, rustic look you might relate to the 1800s. Only when the community lost the exposition 15 years ago did locals realize what impact it had on the local economy.

The painter, Alfred Jacob Miller, was an early artist explorer depicting the American West. But it turns out, he only went out to the West once. His patron, William Drummond Stewart, commissioned Miller to come along to a rendezvous out near present day Pinedale, Wyoming. A rendezvous was a gathering of fur traders and trappers of Native American suppliers. They convened to get ready before the fur trade season came.

Comic books get kids reading and thinking about complex issues. That's definitely the case for an art show now up at the Cheyenne Frontier Days Old West Museum. All the comic book art in this show is by Native American artists.

The museum's marketing director Morgan Marks gave Wyoming Public Radio's Melodie Edwards a tour that started with the illustrated robe of the great Eastern Shoshone Chief Washakie, showing just how deeply ingrained picture storytelling is in Native American cultures.

Fifteen-year-old Kade Clark stood shirtless at a water spigot outside the Niobrara County Fairgrounds in Lusk. He reached into a bucket full of red-brown dirt, grabbed a handful, and ran it under the water. Then, he began to paint himself.

“So we look like Indians and stuff. Yea you get it wet, it gets on easier,” said Clark.

Clark is white, and is one of the dozens of people, from toddlers to the elderly, playing Sioux Indians in The Legend of Rawhide, the annual July Pageant and Wild West re-enactment.

A new art exhibition at the University of Wyoming explores and expands what it means to live in and love the American West. TOPOPHILIA: A loving reconfiguration of the mythology of our American West through studio practices and collaborative projects has its opening reception tonight from 5 to 7 p.m. at the University of Wyoming Visual Arts Building Gallery, and runs through the end of August.

John Farr tells the story of Kit Carson, who was a famous trapper and explorer in the 1800s.  John C. Fremont hired Carson on his expedition as a guide, and together they mapped and explored the American West.

Racial diversity is not one of the things for which Wyoming is best known. According to census data, only one-point-five percent of the state’s population is African American. Now, a class at the University of Wyoming is documenting the largely untold history of black people in the West. The class is confronting black invisibility—real and perceived.

An exhibit of National Geographic’s greatest photographs of the American West is opening in 10 cities across the country this weekend, including Cody and Jackson. It’s an eclectic mix of both historical and modern-day images, which are meant to showcase the nuances and complexity of the West. The National Museum of Wildlife Art in Jackson spearheaded the show … the museum’s CEO Jim McNutt joins us now to talk about it. He tells Willow Belden that figuring out how to organize the photos intelligently took some creativity.