Cody: Two museums Sept 16, 2015

Every little town in Wyoming seems to have its own museum, about the west, the pioneers, the mines, or some local interest. Cody, however, has a huge museum - in fact, five of them under one roof and one title: Buffalo Bill Center of the West.

Ordinarily, I am not much for museums. I like to go in, see what I want as I whisk through, and leave. Too many exhibits overwhelm me. However, prodded by the advice of a friend, I paid my $17 to tour the Buffalo Bill Center. One museum is devoted entirely to Buffalo Bill - his  life, his exploits as a scout and as a showman. Another is devoted to Natural History of the Yellowstone region. A third is the  Whitney Meseum of Western Art. Lots of Remingtons. The fourth is the History of the  Plains Indians (the newest and most interesting). And the fifth has to do with  firearms - which I did  not explore. The highlight of this 3 hour visit was watching the "raptor experience", when an official brought out some sort of damaged and recsued raptor  and told us about it.  Pictured below is a common  turkey vulture - a huge bird that I had  never seen up close. Impressive and interesting. 

 

Then , as I travelled from Cody to Powell (there is a Presbyterian church in Cody; I saw it, but, unfortunately, was unable to arrange anappointment with the pastor), I stopped at the Heart Mountain Relocation Center - or what used to be the Heart Mountain Relocation Center. This was the site of a Japanese Internment Camp during World War II. Eleven thousand Japanese-American citizens were interned  there for almost three years.This was one of ten such camps in the country - a total of 110,000 internees. Now, the site is absolutely barren, except for a walking tour trail through the sage brush that identfies where the  baracks were, the school, etc. A new "interpretive center" has been built, but I, quite alone, walked the windy trail through the now barren place. As you know, barren places often speak to me, and this one certainly did. It reminded me of another very chill, wet day in 1995 when I was a solitary visitor - absolutely no one else there - at Birkenau in Poland. (My family, who had already seen Auchswitz, choose to wait in the car. They had seen enough.) I do not mean to imply that the two camps are similar. Heart Mountain was certainly not a death camp. In fact, over 750 internees joined the US armed forces. One of the internees,  Norman Mineta, became a cabinet member. But read these placques and look at this barren place and feel the power of knowing how wrong we sometimes are.

There are many empty places in Wyoming, where stand historical markers saying something like " Here the Shoshone (or Araphoe or many others) camped and hunted until they were confined on reservation in1868." Now the lands are barren, and the tribes are on the reservations. It's another testimony to the power of barrenness.