“We are the only salt house in North America,” said the woman in charge of the Salt Palace, and when we asked about salt houses on other continents she admitted that she had heard of none. So this may be the only salt house on earth!
Category: Travel
The National Cowboy & Western Heritage Museum is America’s premier institution of Western history, art and culture. Founded in 1955, the museum in Oklahoma City collects, preserves and exhibits an internationally renowned collection of Western art and artifacts while sponsoring dynamic educational programs and ground-breaking scholarly research to stimulate interest in the enduring legacy of our American West.
“Why not have a museum for cowgirls? We have one for the men.”
– Margaret Formby, 2000 Amarillo Globe-News interview
When “Bonanza” first went on the air in 1959, the Ponderosa Ranch where it was supposed to take place did not exist except as soundstages in Hollywood. Outdoor scenes were filmed at the north shore of Lake Tahoe in Nevada; at the beginning of each episode, the titles appeared over a burning map that shoed exactly where Ben Cartright and his three boys (Adam, Little Joe, and Hoss) lived.
Old Tucson consist of 140 buildings originally constructed in 1939 as a set for the movie Arizona, which took place in 1865 and featured some on thousand modern Tucsonians in roles as extras, playing their ancestors.
Old Rip was pet horned toad who belonged to the son of Eastland Justice of the Peace Ernest Wood, and who was put into the cornerstone of the town courthouse, alongside a Bible, when the building was dedicated in 1897.
There are grander things to see in Colorado, but we couldn’t help falling in love with this museum/campground/ souvenir shop with its colossal goggle-eyed plaster bug-big as a horse and named Hercules-above Route 115 south of Colorado Springs.
The Midwest and West have an abundance of pioneer museums, but Harold Warp’s place stands out because of the breadth of his devotion as a collector. Warps, the son fog immigrant pioneers, spend his life acquiring things that showed, in his words, “man’s progress since 1830.”
Most jackalopes are only heads, mounted on wood plaques for the rec room. This giant jackalope is full bodied, and inhabits the out-of-doors: on Center Street in Douglas, Wyoming, the town where the legendary horned rabbit of the West was invented some sixty years ago.
Ghost town is more than just some dusty old mining camp. For one thing, it’s all indoors. And whereas the enchantment if a real ghost town is its sparseness, the fun of this one is marveling at how much stuff it has managed to pack into its twelve different buildings.