Trail Leads East for Roy Rogers Museum

It’s happy trails for the Roy Rogers-Dale Evans Museum, which will leave Victorville next year and relocate to Branson, Mo., curator Roy “Dusty” Rogers Jr. announced Monday.

The move was prompted, Rogers said, by the drop in attendance since the deaths of his father and stepmother, legendary stars of movie and television westerns in the mid-20th century.

Attendance at the museum on the edge of the Mojave Desert has fallen below 50,000 visitors a year, said Rogers. At its peak in the 1990s, when his dad still gave personal tours, the museum drew 75,000 visitors annually, he said.

Known as “King of the Cowboys,” Roy Rogers died in 1998 at age 86, and Evans, “Queen of the West,” died last year at age 88.

A memorabilia-packed museum was a lifelong dream of his father, who had visited cowboy philosopher Will Rogers’ Oklahoma home and had been disappointed by the paucity of artifacts, Dusty Rogers said.

The Victorville museum features thousands of items associated with the couple, including their fancy costumes, family photos and Roy’s cars, guns and watches. The biggest draw is the mounted remains of Roy’s palomino, Trigger, rearing up on its hind legs. Dale’s horse Buttercup, and their “wonder dog,” Scout, are also on display. All will be moved to Branson.

In a news release issued Monday, Rogers said he and other family members “owe it to our parents to continue their legacy. I’m not going to ride a pony down until there are no legs on it.”

The fort-like museum has been the major attraction in Victorville since it moved there from nearby Apple Valley in 1976 to take advantage of traffic on Interstate 15.

Rogers said Las Vegas, Palm Springs, Orlando, Fla., Nashville and other tourist destinations had expressed interest in the museum. Branson, a country music mecca, was his first choice because of its 8.2-million annual visitors and its appeal to “folksy people” like his family, Rogers said.

“We took my mother there about four years ago, and she just loved the area,” he said of Dale Evans, who wrote the couple’s theme song, “Happy Trails.”

“Branson just feels like a good, ol’ pair of boots. It feels like comin’ home.”

Rogers said the Victorville museum would stay open until a month before it moves in the spring.

The Victorville property, which includes the building and 9.94-acre site, is for sale for $3.4 million.

“The continuation of Roy and Dale’s legacy in Branson makes very good sense,” said Mike Rankin, economic development director for the southern Missouri city, adding that he expected attendance to exceed 150,000 a year.

The only promise the community has made to Rogers is a good fit between the institution and Branson’s clientele, many of them old enough to have been fans of Roy and Dale in their heyday, Rankin said.

The $3-million museum will include a theater where Dusty Rogers and his band, the High Riders, will perform and an “old-town, western theme to the front,” Huffman said.

Local western buffs were saddened by news of the move.

“It’s a tremendous loss for Southern California, because Roy was so much a part of the area, not just as a motion picture star but as a resident,” said writer and western historian Richard Carleton Hacker of Sherman Oaks, who knew Roy Rogers for about 20 years.