Call of the West

The Draper Museum of Natural History opened its doors June 4 for an audience of 6,300 visitors. In attendance were two eagles, three hawks, every size and shape of cowboy and several Native American tribal chiefs, not to mention muckety-mucks from Hollywood and the Bureau of Land Management, rangers from nearby Yellowstone National Park, a few politicians and at least one plain-speaking heiress.

The Big Sky was low and blue, white clouds scudded around the Absaroka Mountains, and cottonwood trees sent their fine white threads on a sweet high desert breeze.

So why in tarnation would anyone want to shuffle around inside a museum?

Because the whole way natural history is being communicated is changing. It’s no longer the viewer and the viewed, the exhibit and the observer, neatly divided by glass or bars or even concrete walls. The Draper is not the kind of museum where you peer into creepy dioramas, grip the edges of cases filled with treasures brought home by explorers who had a heck of a lot more fun than you’re having. It’s intended to make explorers of us all.

The Draper Museum is the first museum of natural history to open in the 21st century. “It could create a new conservation paradigm,” said Anne Young, local landowner and Draper board member.

Designed by Denver architects Fentress, Bradburn and Associates and New York-based exhibit designers DMCD Inc., the 55,000-square-foot museum looks a bit like the Guggenheim in Manhattan, only with more glass and more light. A great spiral of levels descends through the building as though the visitor were hiking home from alpine tundra to Douglas fir and lodgepole pine forests, to plains and meadows, all edging a 10,000-square-foot rotunda.

At each level a different ecosystem--its smells, sounds, textures and wildlife--is represented. At trail’s end, there’s a tiled map of Wyoming and Yellowstone, with a great lighted “sky” above that will someday also serve as a planetarium.

“Envioramas,” which include the observer in the exhibit, replace dioramas; listening stations reveal the voices and opinions of President Theodore Roosevelt; Arappoish, a Crow leader; Gifford Pinchot, the first chief forester of the U.S. Forest Service; and naturalist Rachel Carson. You can compare the heartbeats of humans and bears; video “keyholes” take you inside habitats.

A powwow circle has a domed ceiling with a fire ring that lowers for sleepovers. And there are still the old-fashioned taxidermic animals--pikas and yellow-bellied marmots and red-tailed hawks and moose--and touching boxes for children filled with fur, feathers, stones, scat and maps.

And that’s not all. At each level, text and videos help the visitor understand the complex issues of land use, preservation and extinction that erupt almost every day in newspapers, bars and courtrooms in this part of the world.

For instance, 30 Canadian gray wolves were reintroduced to Yellowstone in 1995. The population now numbers between 260 and 550, depending on who is talking, and wolves threaten livestock on surrounding ranches at a cost to the government of $238,000 in damages over the last five years.

“Our exhibit poses the question: Is there room for large predators in the world? I sure hope so,” says Charles Preston, curator of the Draper.

“How Would You Reduce Our Dependence on Foreign Oil?” a caption at another exhibit challenges viewers of all ages. “How Would You Manage Water as the Human Population in the West Continues to Grow?”

The Draper calls itself the first natural history museum to consider the human story and the “nature” story. It is the newest jewel in the crown of five museums that make up the Buffalo Bill Historical Center, beginning with the Buffalo Bill Museum, established in 1927 and dedicated to the presentation and interpretation of the town’s controversial namesake, William Cody.

The Whitney Gallery of Western Art opened in 1958, a gift from Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney. The Plains Indians Museum opened in 1969 and was redesigned and reopened in 1979. The Cody Firearms Museum opened in 1976 with money from the Winchester and Luger families. The McCracken Research Library contains material on Buffalo Bill, Western artists, plains Indians, Western folk music and the natural history of the greater Yellowstone area. Altogether, the center covers seven acres.

“This may be the only place where you can see fine art and prizewinning taxidermy in the same place,” one visitor said.

The new museum cost $17 million to build. Wyoming benefactor Nancy Carroll Draper provided $13 million. Grants from the National Science Foundation, Harvard, Yale and Cornell helped finish the project.

Preston, a biologist and environmental policy analyst, is a man living a life-long dream. During his entire professional life, he has walked the line between academia and what he calls interpretation for “regular people.”

“Science is a good starting point,” he says. “Policy-making, particularly in the West, is driven by dogma and platitudes. We have to get beyond conflict and do some critical thinking. This is the role of the natural history museum in the 21st century.”

He has plans for symposiums, conferences and debates featuring folks on all sides of the issues.

“In general,” he says, “Western legislators have responded badly to what many have perceived as the arrogance of environmentalists. Legislators, to gain support, identify themselves as anti-environmental. But when you start talking to people, you realize that that is not a vision shared by most Westerners.

“Just take Buffalo Bill, who many called an Indian-hater and a bison-killer. Later in his life he was a great supporter of Native Americans and a supporter of preservation. He lived through these issues the hard way and came to his conclusions. It’s time we took a leadership role in the West to finding solutions for problems that are occurring all over the world.”

The turnout at the Draper on June 4 was almost two-thirds the town’s population of 9,000 people, many of whom cannot afford the $10 entrance fee and perhaps attended, one observer said, because this was one of the few days when entry would be free. But still they came, in wheelchairs and strollers. And there is reason to believe, judging from the scarcity of dry eyes when the national anthem was played by the high school band, that they were proud.

Alan Simpson, former Wyoming senator and chairman of the Buffalo Bill Historical Center, arrived from Denver.

“The best way to build a Western museum is with Eastern money,” he had said and chuckled gleefully from seat 9B of the only plane that flies into Cody each day. From there Simpson, who is fifth-generation Cody and 6 feet 7, could stretch his Western legs down the center of the aisle.

“Whitney was a dude, [Research Library benefactor Harold] McCracken was a dude. These people came out from New York and New Haven and fell in love with the West,” he said. “Even Draper family money comes from Eastern textile concerns.”

Even Clint Eastwood flew in for the opening, with Warner Bros. President Alan Horn.

“Western art and jazz are our only true American art forms,” he told an adoring crowd at the opening ceremony. “This new natural history museum is a sensation.”

The keynote speaker was Richard Leakey, son of paleontologists Richard and Mary Leakey and a longtime advocate of wilderness preservation in his native Kenya. He echoed Parsons’ hopes for the Draper Museum.

“If you can figure out the answer to some of these questions of land use and habitat protection and species preservation,” he told the crowd, “you will inspire the whole world.”

Nancy Draper rose to speak to the crowd as 250 monarch butterflies were released. The cowboys waved their hats in the air.

“ ‘Preciate it,” she said and gave the floor to Crow tribal historian Joe Medicine Crow.

“We pray that the Draper will help us heal the land,” he said. “Good trails to follow and places of beauty to enrich our souls.”

Draper Museum of Natural History, 720 Sheridan Ave., Cody, Wyo. (307) 587-4771.