BECKY’S TRIP Day Three

by vols4everus · Published 05/21/2020 · Updated 05/21/2020

The Buffalo Bill Center of the West. It is actually five museums in one!

Becky’s Trip Day Three

Statue of Buffalo Bill at the Buffalo Bill Center of the West.

If adjustments must be made to itineraries on the fly during shoulder seasons in the Rocky Mountains, it is important to give greatest consideration to traffic chokepoints, specifically the weather conditions in high mountain passes, which are a limiting factor on being able to safely traverse a given route, even if portions of that highway have not been formally gated for closure. We had originally planned to do a circuit of the Big Horn Mountains in northeastern Wyoming, but the weather forecast called for snow above 8,000 feet, which definitely would have impacted portions of the roads we intended to traverse, if not force outright closure of the highest sections of those roads. Therefore, we decided to opt for a day-trip to Cody, WY, and a lengthy visit to the Buffalo Bill Center of the West. The take-home message is to build in bad-weather alternatives, whenever possible, for itinerary planning purposes. In short, exercise the flexibility to transform “lemons” into lemonade.

It’s only a two-hour drive from our home to Cody, Wyoming so there was no hurry to leave. A late wake up, followed by a leisurely breakfast and yet we were still on the road well before 11 a.m. It’s about a twenty-minute drive to Laurel, at which point we picked up US 212 south and began our journey to the biggest museum I’ve ever been inside.

This highway, US 212/US 310 journeys south to the town of Rockvale where it splits, with US 212 branching off to the southwest toward Red Lodge and the Beartooth Highway while US 310 continues south toward our destiny with the Buffalo Bill legend. After that fifteen-minute ride, we spent another third of an hour paralleling the Clarks Branch of the Yellowstone River until we reached the waypoint known as Bridger, Montana, one of twenty places named for the famed mountain man.

Just past this town, we came to another “Y” or split in the road. Only this time we got sidetracked. It reminded me of my time in the U.S. Army. I was stationed in Bamberg, West Germany from 1986 until 1989. The road system in that country could be very convoluted, and even with a road map, quite often I would find myself on the wrong thoroughfare. The same thing happened on this day.

We knew the shortest route, or most direct path, to Cody was by way of Montana State Route 72 and then Montana 120. However, we found ourselves still on US 310 heading southeast instead of southwest, and this took us to the small city of Lovell, Wyoming. With a population of well over 2,300 citizens, Lovell ranks as the twenty-third largest metropolis in the state. That’s not saying much, though. The entire state of Wyoming ranked fiftieth of fifty states, with a population of less than 600,000. To put that in perspective, there are thirty-one United States cities that have a higher population.

Turning west, from Lovell, we took Alternate U.S. Highway 14 back to Cody, arriving from the east rather than the north.

Statue of Little Turtle outside the Buffalo Bill Museum of the West.

I don’t know why this statue is here. Little Turtle was a great chief of the Miami tribe in the old “Northwest Territory” in the land south of the Great Lakes. This is modern-day Indiana. He did his fighting, not only back in the east, but it was in the latter part of the 18th century.

Anyone that knows anything about the “Plains Indian wars will know who “Washakie” was. He was, perhaps the greatest of all Shoshone chiefs.

The sign says it all, “Washakie–Chief of the Shoshone.”

Without a doubt, then 16-years old, Sacajawea saved the Lewis & Clark Expedition. While carrying her baby, this heroin and her French husband were hired as guides through the more rugged parts of the Rocky Mountains.

The first thing you see, as you pull into the Buffalo Bill Museum of the West is this statue of Buffalo Bill.

We arrived at the Buffalo Bill Center of the West ready to eat lunch, and fortunately there is a small, but nice food court with just enough tables, as it turned out, for us to have a sit-down meal before exploring the complex. Just so everyone can comprehend what this place is, the Center went from being just “the Buffalo Bill Museum” to a “Center of the West” featuring five different museums:

The Whitney Western Art Museum displays western art, such as paintings and sculptures of the American West. Amongst the many items from famous artists, that you might know, are the works of Frederick Remington, George Catlin and Thomas Moran.

The Draper Natural History Museum is 20,000 square feet of space dedicated to the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem. There are interactive exhibits focusing on the geology and wildlife, as well as the human presence in the area in and around the first national park in the United States of America. In addition, you can view moose, elk, bighorn sheep, wolves and Grizzly bears, stuffed not live, LOL. And, of course, there are many videos, photos and dioramas to help you visualize this amazing ecosystem.

The Plains Indian Museum deals primarily with the Northern Plains Tribes, especially the Crow, Pawnee, Blackfeet, and the Cheyenne, Arapaho and Lakota, more commonly known as the Sioux. According to a Wikipedia article, the Arapaho were close allies of the Cheyenne and loosely aligned with the Lakota (Sioux). A better way of putting that would be ‘the Cheyenne would be a first cousin to the Arapaho, while the Sioux would be second cousins.’ Most of the collections of artifacts are from the early reservation period between 1880 and 1930. While Doug and Becky spent most of their time in this museum, I roamed among the many displays of the “gun museum” as I called it.

The Cody Firearms Museum houses quite possibly the largest collection of American firearms in the world. With over 7,000 firearms, this collection encompasses weapons, such as the crossbow, dating back to the 1500s through the M-16, M60, and AK-47, the standard-issued small-arms weapons used during the Vietnam War.

One exhibit that I found especially enlightening, was the one that had the pistols and gunbelts that Little Joe, Hoss and Ben Cartwright wore on the television show Bonanza. The same for Richard Boone’s character, Paladin, on Have Gun, Will Travel. For those of you who saw the John Wayne version, The Alamo, that seven-barrel monstrosity that Richard Widmark, playing Jim Bowie, carried, is a real gun. I always thought it was something Hollywood made up. Why they even had a simulator of the famed Browning M2 (“Ma Deuce”) HB .50 cal. machine gun. Pull the trigger and you can hear and even feel the recoil.

Little Joe’s gun and gunbelt from *Bonanza*

Ben Cartwright’s gun and gunbelt from *Bonanza*

And then there is the one that started it all, the Buffalo Bill Museum. The original museum opened in 1927. It showcases the life and times of William F. Cody, otherwise known as Buffalo Bill. I could go on all day about the many exploits and supposed exploits of this famous western character. But I won’t; that is for you, the reader, to uncover. Needless to say, however, accounts credit Cody with being a Pony Express rider, a scout for the U.S. Army, even serving under George Armstrong Custer, recipient of the Medal of Honor for heroic action in 1872, killer of 4,282 buffalo during an eighteen month period while supplying food for workers building the great railroads that were traversing the west after the Civil War. And of course, there was the famed Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show that made him larger than life.

The museum is less than a mile from downtown Cody and close to the famous Irma Hotel, which Cody built and named after his own daughter, Irma Cody. We stopped there, during our 2004 vacation with our good friend Gerald and his teenage sons.

At 5:30 p.m., as we began our journey back to Billings, a steady rain, interspersed briefly with big, fluffy flakes of snow began to fall. It was dark by the time we arrived back in Billings, but without any undue incident.