Collection Shows How the West Was Dressed : History: An Oklahoma museum has acquired a rare treasure of clothing and gear from the American frontier.

There is enough gear to furnish a stockade and enough saddles to outfit a stampede--the National Cowboy Hall of Fame is corralling a museum’s worth of memorabilia from the Old West.

Closets packed with suits. Shelves lined with elaborate boots and military helmets bristling with spikes and plumes. Pistols and sabers, holsters and bullets. Drawers of beaded gauntlets, chaps and spurs. Saddles and tack.

A tailored 1840 buckskin suit, ornamented with porcupine quill work, and a pre-Civil War blanket coat--both extremely rare.

The Joe Grandee Museum of the Frontier West is full to bursting with such treasures, about 6,000 in all. Grandee is a Western artist and illustrator from Arlington, Tex.

The collection, acquired late last year, “has the broadest possible range of military accouterments,” said B. Byron Price, the hall’s executive director. “It is especially strong in cowboy material in terms of original hats and boots and clothing and gear. There are more than 150 saddles, for example.”

The exchange was partly a gift from Grandee and partly a purchase by the hall, Price said. He declined to discuss details. The collection is being shipped to Oklahoma City from Texas.

“It really is the finest assemblage of Western memorabilia in private hands--at least we believe that,” Price said.

The collection includes frontier military clothing dating from 1812, American Indian beadwork and clothing, clothing of cowboys and of frontier women. Price said the depth of the collection is exceptional and some of the items are so rare that they cannot be found even in the Smithsonian.

While Grandee’s holdings were called a museum, they actually represent the artist’s lifelong personal collection of material relating to his work and interests.

“Its elements would comprise a good-size museum on the West,” Price said.

Grandee regularly used his collection in his illustrations.

“Close observation of historical costume, horse equipment and weaponry became central to Grandee’s artistic technique, a method that has earned him a well-deserved reputation for accuracy in the world of Western art,” wrote history curator Richard Rattenbury in the hall’s publication, “Western Visions.”

Rattenbury explains that in addition to many purchases of single items from dealers and antiquarians, Grandee bought up the inventories of several defunct theatrical and costume companies whose holdings included much period Western gear.

In the women’s frontier clothing section, the collection has everything from high style to work clothing.

The work clothes typical of the period from the 1880s to 1900 are almost nonexistent in other collections, because the clothes were usually worn until they fell apart, Price said.

American Indian artifacts in the collection include beadwork and clothing of men and women. These pieces represent about 15% of the total collection; most of them are of Sioux, Cheyenne and Apache origin.