Buffalo Bill Center of the West

William F. Cody died in January 1917, and that same year his friends in the town he had founded set out to build him a memorial. It came slowly. Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney's bronze Buffalo Bill, the Scout was presented to the memorial association in 1924, and on July 4, 1927, a museum opened downtown in a log building modeled on the house at Cody's TE Ranch, with Mary Jester Allen as its curator. That log museum now holds the chamber of commerce.

The complex on Sheridan Avenue began in 1959, when the Whitney Gallery of Western Art set the stone walls and peaked rooflines the later wings would follow. The Buffalo Bill Museum moved in beside it in 1969, the Plains Indian Museum opened in 1979, the firearms museum was expanded in 1991 and rebuilt in 2019, and the round Draper Natural History Museum, devoted to the Greater Yellowstone country, opened in 2002. Together they make five museums and a research library under one roof and one ticket.

The Buffalo Bill Museum takes on the showman's myth as well as the man, the Plains Indian Museum treats the Plains nations' art and lives as present as well as past, and the Whitney holds Bierstadt, Remington and Russell. Plan on most of a day.