The American West
History, now
Among its many museums, Los Angeles boasts a museum of “the American West.” Its founder and namesake was one of the most famous television cowboys in television cowboy history: Gene Autry. According to my extensive Wikipedia research, the original plan was to house the Autry Museum of the American West on Autry’s actual ranch, but those dreams went up in a (literal) brushfire. He then turned to Los Angeles’s public ranch—Griffith Park—where the museum can now be found between the Los Angeles Zoo and I-5.
The museum was built in the late 1980s, an architectural era that evokes “suburban high school,” perhaps because that’s when my suburban high school was built. The clinical, dental feeling softens with a nod to the Spanish mission, an institution germane to Southern California’s edificial landscape. A bell tower looms over a tiled courtyard, flanked by a café, a theater, the museum, and (most importantly) the gift shop.
The exterior’s attempt to reconcile past and present continued inside, where the first exhibit we (mother and child) wandered into examined the legacy of the very missions the building was based upon. Since I was pushing the toddler in the stroller my reading was about as extensive as the above Wikipedia research, but the general gist was that the Catholic missions were an instrument of Spanish colonialism that lead to the genocide (both violent and gradual) of indigenous populations. In a piece called “Rematriation,” scrawled messages of resistance covered a wooden pew, a pew that once belonged to a mission marked by a bell tower much like the one that marked museum we were in.
We headed across the hall to a more interactive exhibit where my daughter (along with a couple of other toddlers) enjoyed pulling the drawers open in the “Cabinet of Wild West Wonders” by McPherson (Mac Maker) Downs. The juxtaposition of pop culture myth and brutal reality that comprise the history of the region we inhabit was largely lost on the children, but I bet there are benefits to interacting with art before you even understand it.
At another station, a carriage seat stood in front of a green screen, and you could press a button to watch yourself being chased by different entities on a television monitor in front of you. I was trying to point out how cool this was as lasers, horses, spaceships, and puppies appeared and disappeared behind us, but my daughter was more interested in pressing the button that began the whole sequence than the sequence itself.
Having exhausted the upstairs exhibits, we went downstairs where a little outdoor courtyard houses a native plants garden and a waterfall cascades into a central pond. The small, miraculous beauty of this was unfortunately lost on my daughter, who was preoccupied trying to press the automatic door button. I took this as a sign to head back. We had about ten more minutes until the museum closed. I saw a stuffed bison peering around a corner. I decided to investigate.
I quickly realized that this room was where all the old stuff they hadn’t quite figured out what do with ended up. Things like the aforementioned stuffed bison. A stagecoach. A chuckwagon. And guns. So many guns. Whenever I thought there couldn’t possibly be more guns? More guns.
Sitting there in the basement they hit the metaphorical nail on the head (or shot the bullet into the bull’s-eye, I guess)—they were the reason I was in that very room in the first place. They were what killed and conquered and cleared what was for what is. The violent past that bleeds into the violent present, a question we still haven’t answered.
I walked out feeling like the museum lives up to its name—the West often feels like the last stop in American history. Once we reached the edge of the country, we were done. But time’s resources, unlike geography’s, are infinite, and it still has hours to write, and they’re ours to choose what to do with.
