{"id":8388,"date":"2020-02-20T07:25:02","date_gmt":"2020-02-20T12:25:02","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/?p=8388"},"modified":"2020-10-13T12:57:47","modified_gmt":"2020-10-13T16:57:47","slug":"how-the-west-was-lost-travel-tips","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/?p=8388","title":{"rendered":"How the West Was Lost: Travel Tips"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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A recent trip to Scottsdale prompted a return visit to Western Spirit: Scottsdale\u2019s Museum of the West<\/a>, at 2d Street and Marshall Way\u2014a fine place to spend a couple of hours. There\u2019s a permanent exhibit of Western \u201cstuff,\u201d ranging from saddles to signage to six-shooters, plus special exhibitions. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

On view until August 2020 are more than 300 works from the man called \u201cthe West\u2019s greatest artist,\u201d Maynard Dixon<\/a>. Born in 1875, he lived during the time the frontier American West began to disappear. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

When he was a child, the wars between Indians and European settlers still raged, Texas cowboys herded cattle north long distances to railheads, and \u201ccivilization\u201d was as flimsy as the frontier town stage sets in Blazing Saddles. <\/em>Dixon not only painted hundreds of notable landscapes and portraits, he was a prolific illustrator, producing cover art for magazines and illustrating popular novels. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Artists gave Easterners their first glimpses of the beautiful and dramatic West, but they were less appreciated on their home ground. Said Dixon,
\u201cIn those days in Arizona being an artist was something you just had to endure\u2014or be smart enough to explain why. . . . If you were not working for the railroad, considering real estate or scouting for a mining company, what the hell were you? The drawings I made were no excuse and I was regarded as a wandering lunatic.\u201d <\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Also at the museum, we had the chance to see a one-man show, \u201cWyatt Earp: A Life on the Frontier,\u201d in which one of Earp\u2019s descendants gave the true \u201cnot-what-you-learned-from-Hollywood\u201d story. It was a lot of fun (tickets best ordered beforehand, though I don\u2019t believe the website makes that clear). While this program may not regularly repeat, the museum offers frequent special events, noted on its website.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

By coincidence, on this trip I was reading David Grann\u2019s Killers of the Flower Moon<\/em><\/a>, which puts a tragic twist on the story of the \u201cconquest\u201d of the West. In the 1870s, the Osage tribe had been driven into an unpropitious area\u2014\u201cbroken, rocky, sterile, and utterly unfit for cultivation,\u201d according to a Bureau of Indian Affairs agent. The Osage bought the land, located in what became northeast Oklahoma, thinking it so undesirable they would not be evicted again. Maynard Dixon\u2019s works even evoke this suffering.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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But the new reservation held a surprise. Oil. For a time in the 1920s, tribe members accumulated dollars in the millions, becoming the wealthiest people per capita in the world. Then the murders began. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

It\u2019s a riveting yet almost forgotten real-life tale of greed, corruption, and betrayal that reads like a novel. There\u2019s even a bit part for J. Edgar Hoover, who intuited that solving this case would catapult his little agency\u2014and himself\u2014to national prominence.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Alas, we cannot look back at those days and think the exploitation of our beautiful West ended there. We are still losing it.<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Or maybe this post should be titled \u201cSmall Museums: Part 2.\u201d (Part 1 here<\/a>.) <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

A recent trip to Scottsdale prompted a return visit to Western Spirit: Scottsdale\u2019s Museum of the West, at 2d Street and Marshall Way\u2014a fine place to spend a couple of hours. There\u2019s a permanent exhibit of Western \u201cstuff,\u201d ranging from … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":8390,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"How the West Was Lost: Travel Tips - Visit Scottsdale\u2019s Museum of the West to see the American frontier's drama and beauty. Read Killers of the Osage Moon for the greed, deception and betrayal that accompanied the \"conquest\" of the West.","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[122,52,1288,682,266,267,35,104,78,1596],"tags":[1704,1705,1702,914],"class_list":["post-8388","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-book","category-crime","category-culture","category-fine-arts","category-history","category-non-fiction","category-real-life","category-the-morgue","category-travel","category-true-crime","tag-david-grann","tag-killers-of-the-flower-moon","tag-museum-of-the-west","tag-scottsdale"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/vweisfeld.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2020\/02\/Maynard-Dixon-1.jpg?fit=512%2C649&ssl=1","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2NkiT-2bi","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8388","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=8388"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8388\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":8392,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8388\/revisions\/8392"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/8390"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=8388"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=8388"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=8388"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}