Thomas Gilcrease and His Western Museum (February 1990 | Volume: 41, Issue: 1)

Thomas Gilcrease and His Western Museum

AH article image

Authors: Walter Karp

Historic Era: Era 9: Postwar United States (1945 to early 1970s)

Historic Theme:

Subject:

February 1990 | Volume 41, Issue 1

In August 1902, a 12-year-old farm boy named Thomas Gilcrease, being one-eighth Creek Indian on his mother’s side, received a 160-acre allotment in the land of the Creek Nation, one of the Five Civilized Tribes, which occupied what yet remained of Indian Territory in America. Not long before, by act of Congress, the Creeks had ceased to be a self-governing tribe. By 1907, Indian Territory had become the eastern half of the new state of Oklahoma, and forty-two oil rigs were pumping high-grade petroleum out from under Tom Gilcrease’s land, which, by sheer good fortune, sat atop one of the greatest oil strikes in American history, Oklahoma’s fabulous Glenn Pool.

Some 32 years after that, Thomas Gilcrease, wealthy oilman, began collecting paintings, sketches, artifacts, weapons, costumes, maps, books, and manuscripts bearing on the American West and the American Indian. He went at it so swiftly, so avidly, and so recklessly that in 1954 the city of Tulsa had to take over his incomparable collection in order to shield it from his creditors. Thomas Gilcrease’s lucky Indian allotment had acted on him like some long-delayed time bomb, one whose powerful force and curious timing were very much on my mind when I visited the Gilcrease Museum, which nestles on a well-landscaped hill three miles northwest of downtown Tulsa, self-styled “Oil Capital of the World.”

 
 

Like downtown Tulsa, the museum’s modern, low-slung building is handsome, brand-new, and a trifle impersonal, but a few yards to one side of it stands an old stone house that Tom Gilcrease lived in, on and off, for nearly 50 years. Lodged in the hillside itself is Gilcrease’s tomb, which also contains the remains of his mother, who lived on the hilltop until her death in 1935, and those of his father, who was murdered in his country store one night back in 1913. Both house and tomb are powerful reminders that the Gilcrease Museum, despite its modern building and its municipal status, is the highly personal handiwork of a single man. The staff people refer to him as Mr. Gilcrease as though he were still sitting on the stone house’s porch, feeding his birds, looking out on the Osage Hills in the distance, and grumbling over “gawkers” who came to his hilltop museum without comprehending the treasures he had laid before them.

 
 
 
 
At heart it is the American Indian whom the Gilcrease honors.

And what treasures are on display in the museum’s broad, spacious galleries! There are the incomparable Indian portraits of George Catlin and the delicate genre scenes of Alfred Jacob Miller, the first white artists to lay eyes on the central Rocky Mountains; the breathless panoramas of Albert Bierstadt and Thomas Moran; the gaunt, galloping horsemen of Frederic Remington; and the brave, feckless Montana cowhands of Charles Russell, the “cowboy artist.” Connoisseurs have called