This month's museum pick...

Autry Museum of Western Heritage,
The Southwest Museum

Los Angeles, California

“The Singing Cowboy” Leaves A Landmark Museum Behind Him

Los Angeles’ sprawling Griffith Park has always been an odd duck among such urban gems as Central, Balboa, Stanley, Golden Gate and Forest parks. Where the former are beautiful woodlands and meadows, dotted with lakes or bounded by water, Griffith Park is a huge 4,200-acre (6.5 square miles) chunk of chaparral-covered hills. There are few bosky dells in this park, and the prospect of floating in a rented boat across a swan-plated lake just doesn’t wash here.

Still, the park has one of the best bundle of urban attractions in the country: a well-regarded zoo; the Travel Town train museum (with its miniature train ride and scale-model locomotives); Griffith Observatory (probably the most recognized planetarium in America); the Greek Theater; a 68-horse merry-go-round built in 1926; miles of equestrian trails in a semi-wild landscape only minutes from downtown Los Angeles; and the Autry Museum of Western Heritage.

If the name on the museum sounds familiar, it is. Movie cowboy Gene Autry, famous in the 30s, 40s and 50s as “The Singing Cowboy,” was the mover and shaker behind the founding of this facility, now regarded as one of the best museums on the history of the American West in the United States. Autry, a modest man who quietly amassed a $100 million fortune, later in life decided to build a facility that would explore and honor the complex history of the West: its original inhabitants; its discovery by Europeans; its settlement by Mexicans and Americans; the brief reign of the cowboy; and the place where nationalism, legend and Hollywood put it in popular imagination.

He asked for assistance designing the building from Walt Disney’s “imagineers,” reasoning that they would know how to create a bright, dynamic, accessible site that could teach visitors a lot in a short time. The museum opened in 1988, centered on seven theme galleries: Discovery, Opportunity, Conquest, Community, Cowboy, Romance and Imagination. Within each gallery are artifacts, dioramas, and permanent and special  exhibitions expanding on its respective theme.

The Autry Museum is a smaller version of the Smithsonian in terms of its function as a sort of national attic for the paraphernalia of western life. Its collections span from serious studies of Indian leaders by 19^th-century portraitists and monographs by explorers like John C. Fremont, to Hollywood western movie posters and Davy Crockett coonskin caps from the 50s.

There’s even a diagram Wyatt Earp drew of the shootout at OK Corral, as well as pistols once owned by sharpshooting Annie Oakley and the outlaw, Belle Starr. 

Autry, who along with Roy Rogers invented the genre of the singing B-movie cowboy, was a popular figure with mid-20^th century moviegoers, and he was successful on TV. But he curbed his ego at his museum’s door, giving himself a very small part of the exhibition on celluloid cowboys. What Autry really wanted to do was show the West from enough different angles that the truth of it would come out. He knew even in the late 80s that there were dueling concepts of the West, from the overly romanticized Manifest Destiny West of noble cowboys and ignoble savages to silly Marxist parodies that reduced the region to a vast racist, sexist, classist hellhole. Somewhere among the contending points of view, he reasoned, people might apprehend a true sense of the Old West.

The Southwest Museum

A fine accompaniment to a visit to the Autry Museum is a visit to the Southwest Museum in Highland Park, a hilly neighborhood about five miles northeast of Los Angeles. To get from the Autry to the Southwest is a 10-minute freeway ride, and the two museums compliment each other well.

The Southwest is an anthropological museum dedicated to the American Indian. Though its collections span cultures from Alaska to Tierra del Fuego, its strongest in its coverage of tribes from the southwestern United States and Mesoamerica. It’s the oldest museum in Los Angeles, having opened downtown in 1907. In 1914, the museum moved to its current Spanish-style building, a handsome landmark presence at the top of Mt. Washington.

Although its primary emphasis is on Indian artifacts, the Southwest has also collected art and memorabilia from the Spanish and Mexican eras in the West, putting them in the context of a period of settlement that saw white and mestizo farmers gradually encroach on Indian territories.

The museum’s creator was Charles Fletcher Lummis, a New Englander who emigrated to Southern California by walking 3,000 miles from Cincinnati to get there. He fell in love with the landscape along the Arroyo Seco, a sycamore-lined, seasonal watercourse that ran from foothills in Pasadena to the Los Angeles River. Lummis built a massive concrete and granite-boulder house, El Alisal (the sycamore), at the base of the hill that would later accommodate the Southwest Museum. Lummis, a learned man, organized the Southwest Society in 1903, an official branch of the Archaeological Institute of America. The society’s main – and subsequently successful – goal was the establishment of a regional museum.

 — Patrick Totty