Wild West Museum

The Wild West, which has supplied the U.S. with some of its most stirring epics and evocative art, curiously had no major museum it could call its own. Last week, with the opening of the $400,000

Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney Gallery of Western Art in Cody, Wyo. (pop. 5,872), this oversight was remedied. Now tourists, folklore specialists and art lovers alike can see in a handsome 240-ft.-long gallery the Old West in all its glory, ranging from an Indian brave's buckskin jacket with porcupine-quill embroidery and the original "Deadwood Stage" built in Concord, N.H. in 1840 to works by such master painters of the West as George Catlin, Albert Bierstadt and Alfred Jacob Miller, plus the entire studio collection of Frederic Remington, the greatest of Western painters, donated by the W. R. Coe Foundation along with a $500,000 trust fund to help maintain the new gallery.

Cody has an Easterner to thank for its new museum, and a woman at that. One day in 1890, a young sculptress named Gertrude Vanderbilt went to see Colonel William F. ("Buffalo Bill") Cody and his Wild West show, was so fascinated that she went backstage to ask the colonel if she could sketch some of his mustangs. It was the beginning of a lifelong interest in the West, which persisted even after her marriage to Financier Harry Payne Whitney. She sculpted a monumental statue of Buffalo Bill, in 1924 donated it to the town of Cody, along with 40 acres of land, as the nucleus of the Buffalo Bill Historical Center. Five years ago her son, Cornelius Vanderbilt Whitney,* donated $250,000 to build the new gallery, which in effect transforms the old center into the major museum his mother had envisioned--a place, said son Whitney, "where you will see Western history at its best."

* Whose filly Silver Spoon last week finished a disappointing fifth in the Kentucky Derby.

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