A Wild West Business Plan

Making my Museum Mission (M) statement                 

In looking back at my post from a few weeks ago, I see now how foolish it was to assume that I would be able to cover the development of my hypothetical Wild West museum in just two posts, no matter how hypothetical it is. The whole point of this exercise is to examine the challenges that museums of this sort face, from their conception to their construction. To sum up these challenges in just two posts would do a disservice to both the industry and to my better understanding of it. So today, instead of bringing my pipe dream to its conclusion, we will just examine the next chapter on the long, long road towards getting the place funded by a philanthropic billionaire.

This chapter is the museum’s mission statement. Every museum has one. It’s one to three sentences explaining why the institution exists, and what it’s trying to accomplish. For history museums, the mission statement usually provides a brief summary of the place and time period that is being represented. It helps you and your fellow visionaries to focus on the subject that you're trying to cover, and clearly explains exactly how you are different from other institutions doing similar things.

To give you a few examples, let’s turn to the two institutions that I’m channeling most closely; Plimoth Plantation, which showcases a replica of the 1627 Pilgrim settlement, and Old Cowtown in Kansas, an existing Wild West museum. The mission of Plimoth Plantation is to create “powerful, personal encounters with history built on thorough research about the Wampanoag People and the Colonial English community in the 1600s.” Old Cowtown Museum states that they are “an open air, living history museum that presents the history of Wichita, Sedgwick County, and life on the southern plains, circa 1865 - 1880.”

Each mission outlines exactly what it is that the museum is trying to accomplish, what makes it unique. The specifics of how the mission is to be carried out are left undefined, allowing for experimentation and evolution.

                

Working with this format, let’s decide what we want to do with our yet un-named replica frontier town. Here are a few goals that I would like our museum to strive for.

1. To present a detailed look at life in a western frontier town of the late 1800s.
2. To examine the people who lived in the town or nearby; who they are, what they do, and why they came to the town.
3. To present the frontier life from as many different viewpoints as possible, utilizing historically accurate personalities, trades, and diverse ethnicities.

Vague, but it’s a start and we’ll work with it. As with other museums of this sort, our living history museum will also demonstrate period crafts, skills, and folkways. In order to keep all of these interpretations as accurate as possible, research will be carried out pretty much continuously, so as to remain current with recent scholarship. As we don’t have a location yet, or even a name, we can’t pin down these elements, but based on our goals we can craft a working mission statement that looks something like this:

“Nameless, faceless Wild West Museum aims to connect the public with the history of time and place, using recent scholarship and advanced interpretation techniques. NFWWM will furthermore explore the myths and realities of the Old West and the different people and groups who occupied it.”

As we continue to develop our vision of the museum, the mission statement can be edited, specified, and changed to more accurately reflect what we want to accomplish. Next time, we'll try to pin down exactly where and when we want our living history to live.

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Are you a philanthropic billionaire, or an easily persuaded one? Do you have a good-for-nothing frontier town lying around that refuses to get a job? All of these comments and more can be left in the comments section below.

The Pipe-dream, and Problems that Arise from it

THE IDEA

At Plimoth Plantation last November, several friends and I were between visitors and very bored. Massachusetts in the late fall doesn’t really encourage one to wander around outside, even in replica Pligrim clothing. Once the sun starts to dip towards the horizon and visitation dries up, everyone starts to congregate in three or four houses throughout the Colonial English village, and compete to see who can huddle up closest to the hearth without actually setting their clothes on fire. This particular day, a group of us started talking about what we would do if we were to find ourselves suddenly handed a blank check and told to use the money to create our own living history museum. Ideas were thrown around. Things got messy.

Fake John Alden suggested a first-person Pirate museum, somewhere down in the Caribbean. His fake wife Priscilla liked the idea of a Victorian house designed to showcase the history of the Spiritualist movement, complete with a séance. Someone else wanted to design a Revolutionary fort. Having just days before watched the classic Sergio Leone film “The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly,” I began to think about the possibility of a Wild West living history museum, where the first-person interpreters would all portray cowboys, gunslingers, and saloon keepers.

THE PROBLEM

This all started out as idle conversation, of course. But as November dragged on, we Pilgrims found that we would get a large rush of school groups in the morning, all of them eager to talk about Squanto and the first Thanksgiving. By the afternoon, these groups would be back on their warm school buses, and we would once again be huddled around our fires, talking to pass the time. And we began to expand on our original ideas. Given the opportunity, how would we organize these museums? How would they teach us about history? How authentic would they be?

This last question is one that living history museums struggle with constantly. The whole idea behind first-person interpretation is to immerse the visitor in a different world, a different time period. You’re half historian, half actor, and you play your role without a script. You dress, work, and eat the part, doing most activities in the same way that the people you represent would have done them. But sometimes the 17^th century is just too… extreme for a modern person. A New Plimoth resident in 1627 would have relieved themselves into a clay pot the size of a tea kettle and then chucked the contents into the streets. If a museum today tried to be that authentic, the Department of Sanitation would close it down and chuck the staff out into the streets.

A Wild West museum comes with its own set of problems; some very similar, some completely unique. Chamber pots and outhouses would still have to be present, for the sake of appearances, but the Muzees would probably choose to use modern facilities, cleverly hidden in a barn or something. There would still be the conundrum of nineteenth-century prejudice; how authentically should the interpreter portray period attitudes towards women, African Americans, Native Americans, and other frontier minorities? How much affected bias can you get away with for the sake of education? How much should you be able to get away with?

Then there’s the constant balancing act between authenticity and the pop culture perception of a period. I guarantee that if this Wild West museum ever becomes a reality, every male staff member I hire is going to have seen the same Clint Eastwood films that I have, and they’re all going to want to be the Man with no Name. Given the chance, everyone is going to pass up roles as blacksmiths, telegraph operators, missionaries and common laborers. They’re going to dress up in a white hat and a poncho, and spend their days playing poker and ogling prostitutes at a saloon. A Most visitors would probably want their Wild West museum to have a daily event where gunslingers face off in the main street at high noon. Tumbleweeds blow by, revolvers are drawn, in a life and death contest to find out who’s the faster shot.

These are issues that every living-history museum must face, where the educational experience you’re trying to present must compete with the expectations of the public that finances your operations. And they’re issues that must be revisited, year after year, to determine whether your mission is focused more on changing a perception, or catering to it.

Come back in a few days to read more about my vision of a living history museum devoted to the Wild West. If you can’t wait that long, visit this site to see how an existing museum in Kansas has recreated one of the most recognizable periods of American history.