In a small dugout built into the side of a hill near Hobart, Lula Benn Lamb-—a teacher with few material belongings— clung to her treasures. Photographs, embroidered linens, and sterling silver shone on display amid the dirt walls of her one-room homestead.

“A sod house often covered pearls,” Lamb said in a 1937 interview with Effie S. Jackson for the Indian-Pioneer Papers oral history collection.
It was fascinating trailblazers like Lamb who helped shape southwestern Oklahoma, and today, the Museum of the Western Prairie showcases their stories and the historical riches they left behind.

Built into a hillside in Altus, the boxy stone structure takes visitors back in time to the turn of the twentieth century. The forty-seven-year-old museum contains more than twenty thousand artifacts, fourteen thousand photographs, and a library of more than eight thousand printed resources, including journals, newspaper clippings, booklets, and letters.

Two galleries and a courtyard pay homage to the settlers who first made a permanent home on the prairie more than a century ago and continue to inspire the community today, Museum Director Jennie Buchanan says.

In this exhibit of musical instruments of the late 1880s to early 1900s inside the Museum of the Western Prairie, visitors can see a pump organ owned by early Altus resident Daniel Grey Simpson. Photo by Lori Duckworth

“I think they had the belief that, ‘One day I will have a home that these pieces deserve,’” she says. “‘I’ll secure the land. I’ll make it productive, build a home, and my treasures will have a suitable place.’ They were very optimistic people, and they were very hardworking.”

Just inside the museum is a bison-hide painting by Oklahoma Cheyenne and Arapaho artist Harvey Pratt depicting Devil’s Canyon, the first formal meeting place between the U.S. government and the Plains Indians. Sounds of a cattle drive play from the corner of the gallery, anchored in the center by a covered wagon and a carriage used for the mail.

A collection of sixteen Tramp art frames handcrafted from cigar boxes are clustered in an exhibit honoring pioneer photographer George Washington Long. Long captured the assimilation of local Kiowa and Comanches into white culture in the early 1900s. In one photograph, Kiowa Bruce Lone Wolf is seen in a traditional floor-length feathered headdress. In a photo directly below, he is depicted in a western suit and tie.

In the adjacent gallery, a map of southwest Oklahoma covers a large wall. The Red River outlines the unassigned lands where reports of prime ranch land came from cattle drovers returning from the trail. Texans settled the area until 1896, when the United States Supreme Court ruled that the land was part of Oklahoma Territory. That opened 1.5 million acres that make up modern-day Jackson, Greer, Harmon, and a portion of Beckham counties. Model displays line the walls of this gallery with a focus on agriculture: a cotton gin in the center of town, a wheat-harvesting operation that brought neighbors together, and a citywide irrigation system.

Two corner exhibits jump ahead in time. One includes a Cold War-era missile launch station. In the 1960s, there were twelve such sites in communities surrounding Altus Air Force Base. The adjacent exhibit includes scaled models of every aircraft flown from the base since the 1940s set against the backdrop of Lake Altus-Lugert.

A third gallery provides space for temporary exhibits or contemporary works from local students and artists. But taking their leave through the outdoor courtyard, visitors get one last glimpse into Oklahoma’s pioneering past.

Perched on a hill overlooking the courtyard is the Cross S Ranch House. The dirt walls of the half dugout home, rust of antique farm equipment, and the creak of a metal windmill take visitors back to the colonization of the western prairie. The two-story stone abode was moved to the museum grounds and rebuilt to resemble the elegant 1891 structure that would surely be worthy of Lamb’s precious possessions.

Written By

Whitney Bryen