History Tells Us

The Gene Autry Western Heritage Museum

The Gene Autry Western Heritage Museum is situated not far from the Griffith Park Zoo and is famous all over the world as a place of the history and mythology of the American West. When you enter the museum’s courtyard the first thing that you see and that impresses you is a life-size bronze sculpture of Gene Autry called ‘Back in the Saddle Again’. The Gene Autry museum is an interesting place to visit and you can spend here the whole day. I am thankful to my professor for such opportunity to feel the friendly, exciting and impressive atmosphere of the Gene Autry museum.

The Autry Museum of Western Heritage is devoted to the old movie things, its history and the mythology of the American West. Nowadays the museum is called the Autry National Center and is well worth to visit. The museum includes nine galleries, a theater, Golden Spur restaurant, an educational center and a gift shop. That would not be an exaggeration to say that a visit of the Autry Museum of Western Heritage is much more than ‘a step into the past’. It displays pieces of art, artifacts containing invaluable treasures, such as paintings of Bierstadt, Wyeth, Remington and Moran, and written materials that document the history of the American West. It is necessary to mention the art of Native Americans that is really worth seeing and that I liked it most of all. These pieces of art depict the way people were hunting and the way they saw animals – buffalos, and could picture them.

Moreover, the armor of Spanish conquistadors and costumes from the favorite Western films are of great attention as well. The movie theme is present almost everywhere in the museum and several exhibits are devoted to Western films. Cameras used to film some old films, like ‘The Squaw Man’; posters and costumes of William S. Hart, Tom Mix, Buck Jones, Tim McCoy and Ken Maynar; gun belts worn by Clint Eastwood, John Wayne, Clark Gable, Paul Newman, and Gary Cooper from movies ‘High Noon’ and ‘Stagecoach’; costumes and guns used in Western TV shows, like ‘Bat Masterson’, ‘Wyatt Earp’, ‘The Rifleman’, ‘Have Gun, Will Travel’, “Gunsmoke’, ’The Lone Ranger’, ‘The Big Valley’, ‘The Cisco Kid’, and ‘Hopalong Cassidy’ – can be seen in the Gene Autry Western Heritage Museum. Besides, every exhibition is equipped with a video in order to see a short video that is devoted to the general theme of the exhibition. For example, the exhibition devoted to cowboys on the screen displays video fragments from popular westerns.

The Gene Autry Western Heritage Museum is not a closed book of Western history, but rather something still in the making. It is great that the Museum’s ever-expanding collection includes works by contemporary artists. One of the museum’s purposes is to collect and study material relating to the fictional West of literature, art, film, television, and even advertising. Summarizing, the museum is a place where you can wander for hours and you still find more and more interesting pieces of art, costumes from famous western films and other interesting things. It is a place, which exhibit and interpret the heritage of the West and where cowboys, Native American Indians and Spanish conquistadors are represented throughout the galleries and exhibitions.

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