How the West Was Won, Round 2 : The Only Question at the Gene Autry Museum Is How It Will Be Interpreted

It was a classic showdown of the new West.

On one side, the Gene Autry Foundation needed a site for its proposed Western Heritage Museum and Griffith Park seemed like a natural choice.

On the other side, community and environmental activists made their stand, arguing that a public park is no place for what they portrayed as a movie cowboy’s self-aggrandizing sideshow.

In the continuing saga of the real West, nothing is simple. Instead of six-shooters, the battle was fought with public review sessions, political lobbying and environmental impact statements. Who wore the white hats and who wore black depended on one’s perspective.

Last October, museum supporters won the rhetorical shootin’ match, and workers have already raised a three-story shell of steel studs and cinder blocks on a 13-acre swatch of gently sloping parkland across from the Los Angeles Zoo.

Matter of Conflict

By next October, the museum staff will have filled the cavernous structure with history. But the so-called taming of the American West is still a matter of conflict among historians. Myths and realities are inextricably tangled. Interpretations tend to be tainted with the politics of the present.

Yet, how successfully society pushes on to future frontiers may well depend on how clearly we understand this crucial era of our past, historians argue. And with 52,000 square feet of exhibit space and an initial budget of $25 million--excluding the price of artifacts--the Autry museum is certain to have a significant effect on America’s collective appreciation of its Western heritage.

Much of the planning for the new Western Heritage Museum is being done in Autry’s suite of red-carpeted offices at Golden West Broadcasting on Sunset Boulevard.

A Bollin parade saddle, heavy with silver, occupies his receptionist’s office. Artist Frederic Remington’s bronze Indian war parties prowl about, bronze broncos toss cowpokes, and sculpted owls and eagles and big horn sheep occupy other perches in the room.

All of these will eventually have a home in the museum.

“Indian Joe,” a wizened plastic character in full headdress and faded denims, slumping in a chair behind Autry’s desk, won’t.

But the staff plans to enlarge to “heroic size” the centerpiece of Autry’s inner sanctum--a bronze sculpture of the singing cowboy serenading his horse--and place it in the museum’s courtyard.

Which should not be taken as a confirmation of critics’ suspicions that the place will lionize the “singing cowboy,” said Joanne Hale, vice president and executive director of the museum.

Set Three Goals

The “dream” of a Western museum is something Autry has had since he started collecting artifacts in the 1940s, Hale said. She added, however, that from the moment serious planning began, Gene and his wife, Jackie Autry, along with Hale and her husband, Monte--longtime friends of the Autrys--fixed on three goals for the museum.

It will be “a true cultural and educational center,” it will strive for accreditation with the American Assn. of Museums, and it will be “so exciting, educationally, that schoolchildren won’t even know that they have learned,” Hale said.

She placed ads for a curator in publications of the American Association of Museums and the American Assn. of State and Local Historians.

More than 40 applicants sent in resumes. Hale interviewed three finalists.

Historians Hired

James H. Nottage, then supervisory historian for the Kansas Museum of History in Topeka, accepted the job of curator. John P. Langellier, who had been director of museums for the state of Wyoming, became research historian.

Both said they were excited not only by the broad approach to Western history the museum proposed to take, but also by the museum’s commitment to innovation, as evidenced by the fact that Hale and the Autrys had decided to use Walt Disney Imagineering to design and create the exhibits--a controversial move by the standards of some museum professionals.

Any fears the historians had that Disney might take a Cowboy Mickey approach have been allayed, they said.

“On occasion, I’ve had to remind them: ‘Hey guys, it’s a terrific show, but we’re not Disneyland,’ ” Langellier said. He added, though, that the Disney-designed exhibits “are slick and compelling--these are some of the best ways to teach history today.”

And the curator and historian stressed that they are responsible for the content. Like pedagogues filling a textbook, they’ll decide what to emphasize, what to ignore and how to interpret a period about which thousands of books have already been written.

In a phone conversation, Autry, 80, revealed his personal view of Western history as a time in which Anglo settlers “all rode horses” and “lived in log cabins” in the wilderness. But Nottage said he has received absolutely no pressure from Autry or the foundation regarding how to interpret history. The museum, he and other staff members said, will embrace the complex issues surrounding the history of the West.

And the issues are complex.

Part the conflict among historians is hinted at in a story told by Martin Ridge, senior historian at the Huntington Library in San Marino:

One day, a Puritan preacher asked an old Indian, who had witnessed the westward migration of settlers: “What do you think of the civilization of the whites?”

As Ridge tells the story, the Indian thought hard, then replied: “Yes, you are right; it would be a very good idea.”

The most common view of Western history came to prominence through the work of turn-of-the-century historian Frederick Jackson Turner. Sometimes called “frontier history,” the Turnerian view holds that the unique American character is the product of westward expansion--that as successive waves of explorers and pioneers and settlers pushed back the Western wilderness, they and the institutions they brought with them were profoundly changed by the struggle of civilization over primitivism, of man over nature.

“It’s white man’s history,” Ridge explained. “If you define the frontier by the movement of whites, then Indians become a barrier.”

Another shortcoming of this approach is that “Turner ain’t got no women,” explained Sandra Myres, a professor of history at the University of Texas at Arlington and the president of the Western History Assn. “His books are as devoid of women as the plains supposedly were devoid of trees.”

In truth, though, women played an integral role in Western history, Myres said. Women were entrepreneurs, businesswomen and community builders, as well as comforters and homemakers--the folks who ran the schools and churches.

“In the 1870s, the largest property owner in Dallas was a woman. . . . All over California, there were very prominent women who ran large-scale businesses.”

But the popular media have long supported the Turnerian view, Myres believes. So the non-historian is stuck with stereotypes of Calamity Jane and Belle Starr, the “prairie madonna,” the “sun bonnet saint,” or ‘the reluctant pioneer” as depicted in a famous painting of male pioneers gazing bravely towards the West, while a woman, clutching an infant to her breast, looks longingly back to the East.

Modified Approach

Over the past three decades, most historians have been modifying the Turnerian approach to history, or abandoning it in favor of a less simplistic view.

“The frontier view generally emphasized a rural outlook and values in American society,” said William Rowley, a professor of history at the University of Nevada, Reno, and the executive secretary of the Western History Assn. “It emphasized the agrarian heritage more than it does the industrial and urban heritage. But many people are seeing now that the West from the beginning was an urban type of process.”

Mining towns were urban environments within the wilderness, and cities, as places of commerce, were even more important in settling the West than the availability of good land, he said.

But Turner’s “hero approach to history,” has taken root in the American consciousness, Rowley said. “It emphasizes the man on the white horse who solves all of our problems. It’s a romantic, uncritical view of our history, (which) in recent conservative times has been revitalized to some extent.”

Accepting a romantic view of history may even prove dangerous, some historians feel.

“The West stands for the future,” said Howard Lamar, a professor of History at Yale University and the editor of the Readers Encyclopedia of the American West. Because it has what is left of America’s undeveloped land, the West is where the complex environmental debates are now being fought; because it is the home of Native Americans, as well as a huge minority population, it’s where problems of “our pluralistic society” will be resolved, he said.

The history of the West “is more complicated and in a sense more sophisticated,” than the way Turner painted it. And unless people realize the complex problems of the past, they may be destined to “take a simplistic approach to the future,” he said.

“The bottom line is, the West is not just a place in the past, but a living entity with us today as reality,” said John Langellier of the Autry museum. And the museum will reflect that reality, he said.

The museum won’t try to compete with the nearby Southwest Museum’s extensive Native American displays, but it won’t present an Anglo-centric portrayal of the clashing cultures either, Nottage and Langellier said.

‘West Is a Mosaic’

“We are very cognizant of the fact that the West is a mosaic, and not a lily white society created by 6-foot, 5-inch blonds who came out with six-guns. . . . There’s a great deal of emphasis on blacks, on Hispanics and Asians--not only the Chinese who built the railroads, but . . . the new wave of immigrants.”

“This will not be a whitewash of the West . . . not all good guys and bad guys. We’re very sensitive to injustice,” Langellier said.

Nor will the museum be an enclave of historical machismo, “where mom drops off dad when she takes the kids to the zoo. . . . Quite the contrary. We are very cognizant of the role women played in the American West and continue to play.”

“Darn right!” Hale snapped as she stood over a model of the 140,000-square-foot museum, complete with restaurant, gift shop and administrative offices.

Visitors to the museum will take “a walk through history,” moving through seven permanent galleries depicting some “spirit” of the West, Hale explained.

In the “Spirit of Community” exhibit, for example, they’ll learn how “people banded together for protection and socializing.”

The emphasis on “law and order,” touted in some publicity material, may lead historians to believe that Autry will be taking a purely Turnerian shoot-’em-up approach, Nottage said. In fact, though, the museum will show that most early Western communities had fairly sophisticated systems for the legal settling of disputes.

That doesn’t mean that legendary lawmen and outlaws of the West will be slighted, he said. And the final exhibits--”the Spirit of the Cowboy,” “the Spirit of Romance,” and “the Spirit of Imagination”--will show that even the real people living in the real West often transformed themselves to better suit the mythical archetypes artists and writers were creating.

For example, Langellier said, in trying to live up to his legend, Bill Cody actually became the Buffalo Bill that Eastern writers had created.

Showing how America’s perceptions of the West were forged is important, Nottage said. “Buck Jones, Gene Autry, Hopalong Cassidy--all those people had codes of conduct avidly followed by children. Mythological heroism is a powerful force.”

But only a quarter of the museum will focus on Hollywood gunslingers, singing cowboys, Wild West shows and the like. “Three quarters (of the museum) is devoted to looking at so-called real issues in Western history,” he said.

Western Vegetation

One of the more innovative aspects of the museum will be an outdoor garden, planted with trees and vegetation specific to different Western regions and visible from the museum lobby through a three-story window.

Disney Imagineering is creating steel and concrete geological formations to enclose the rear of the garden. Visitors walking along the dirt trail will feel immersed in the open West as it was over a century ago, staff members said.

As they look up, however, they’ll also confront the legacy of westward expansion: power lines, telephone poles, droning aircraft and mountains, barely visible through smog, encrusted with houses and topped with communications antennas.

And right on the other side of the rock formations, they’ll see and hear the roaring Golden State Freeway.

“Yesterday’s trails are today’s freeways,” Langellier said.