The museum and heritage center covers plenty of Old West ground.
Frontier Texas!—with or without the exclamation point—is likely to elicit exclamations of approval from visitors with a hankering for Old West history. In the heart of Abilene, this Western heritage center and interactive museum brings the Texas frontier to life while also serving as the official visitor center for Abilene and the 650-mile Texas Forts Trail. Frontier Texas is also one of the few museums in the world to relate history through life-size holographic figures.
Visitors enter through the high-definition, surround-sound Blood & Treasure welcome theater, which screens a 12-minute introduction (narrated by Gunsmoke star Buck Taylor) to a museum that opened in 2004 and underwent a $2 million renovation in 2012.At the other end of the facility the immersive Frontier Experience Theater puts viewers in the midst of a shootout in the Beehive Saloon, a thunderstorm on the prairie, an Indian attack and a buffalo stampede. In between visitors will find visual treats at each of seven exhibits—“A Wild Land,” “Comanche Empire,” “Buffalo Hide Trade,” “Military on the Frontier,” “Cowboys and Longhorns,” “Frontier Settlements” and “Guns of the West.”
“A Wild Land” relates the geologic and early cultural history of this harsh and perilous land, where survival was the primary focus for animals and man. The Spanish, who tried to establish missions and presidios, incurred the opposition of many tribes from the late 17th century through the 18th century. It was the Comanches who, after acquiring horses from the Spanish in about 1700, first achieved dominance in the region, as described in “Comanche Empire.” They called themselves Numunah (“Our People”) and made would-be settlers unwelcome in their Comancheria homeland for at least 150 years. On display are examples of their bows and arrows,spears, tomahawks and guns. The “Military on the Frontier” and “Buffalo Hide Trade” exhibits also relate Comanchetales. The U.S. military established forts in Texas following the Mexican War, first to prevent the Comanches from raiding into Mexico and then to protect settlers from the Comanches and other Indians deemed hostile. Despite a treaty that preserved bison for Indian use, the military mostly looked the other way when non-Indian hunters set their sights on the valuable beasts. It took them less than a decade to wipe out the Texas herds.
No museum depicting the history of Texas would be complete without a tribute to the Texas waddies and the cattle they drove north to the Kansas railheads.The “Cowboys and Longhorns” exhibit presents relevant artifacts as it tells the story of the “Lone Star State” cattle trade.The original terminus of the Chisholm Trail was Abilene, Kansas, the first of the Kansas cow towns.Abilene, Texas, which cattlemen established in 1881 as a stock transshipment point on the Texas & Pacific Railway,was named for that Kansas town. The “Frontier Settlements” exhibit introduces visitors to the people, good and bad, who populated Abilene and the other Texas towns.
Of course the taming, or shaping, of the wild frontier was largely made possible by firearms,from muzzle loaders and flintlocks to Winchesters and Colts, and the “Guns of the West” exhibit puts the spectrum of weapons on display. You’ll learn that at the time of the Civil War a soldier had about the same firepower as a Comanche warrior with a quiver of arrows, while postwar technical advancements in weaponry made one suitably armed soldier equal to about a dozen bow-carrying Comanches. Several of the historic firearms are from the Fort Phantom Hill collection. The U.S. Army operated out of Fort Phantom Hill from 1851 to 1854.Today the fort site [www.fortphantom.com], on the banks of the Clear Fork of the Brazos 10 miles north of Abilene, is a stop on the Texas Forts Trail. Three of the post’s original stone buildings and other remnants still stand.
Finally, the museum’s new “Early Texas” exhibit area features interactive discovery stations that showcase the region’s natural history. Providing plenty of interest for visitors of any age (children certainly included), Frontier Texas is at 625 N. First St. in downtown Abilene. For more information call 325-437-2800 or visit www.frontiertexas.com.
Originally published in the February 2015 issue of Wild West. To subscribe, click here.
