Blaine Voyage

Today we went to the Buffalo Bill Center of the West in Cody, WY. This museum was crazy — it was at least four or five different museums all squished together into one large building!

I thought that the Buffalo Bill Center of the West was very interesting and very fun and I learned a lot of things about the Wild West and Buffalo Bill.

I learned that Buffalo Bill was a scout for the United States Army and that he also killed lots of buffalo. But later in his life he started trying to keep the buffalo safe from extinction. We also watched a video about Buffalo Bill becoming an actor that included a guy dressing up as a bear to scare Buffalo Bill and Buffalo Bill shot the bear’s head off to scare it away but then the guy’s head popped up instead. The video also included Buffalo Bill’s eyes turning gold with dollar signs in them. This video was the funniest video we’ve seen at any park or museum so far. My mom noticed that it was produced with help from a filmmaking class at Cody High School, which she thought was awesome. Here’s a clip:

I also liked the way the museum showed me things that I would never have learned. I also had fun trying to make the ghost of Buffalo Bill go away. It wasn’t an actual ghost — it was just a figure projected onto either steam or smoke. It wasn’t hot, so it wasn’t steam. It must have been smoke. Blech.

I also liked how they made a cool online scavenger hunt that Sissy did for free ice cream. In it we had to get different answers to different questions about different things that were in the Museum. There were lots of different questions and it was really cool because the scavenger hunt sent us to many different exhibits and taught us a lot of things.

My sister is doing a project about the Lakota so we spent a lot of time in the Plains Indian Museum. I learned about earth huts, what the Native American tribes did at different times of the year, and I learned that the Lakota were the first to make dolls.

This museum also had a cool playground that had a fake jail that actually sort of looked like it could be one except that it had some pretty easy ways to get out. It also had a fake wagon and an actual playground part. Sissy and I played that we were two cats that had been framed for doing something that we hadn’t actually done and we had a jailbreak that was actually sort of easy.

The museum also had a not-so-cool gun museum/exhibit (eek!) that we had to go to for the scavenger hunt. I did not like the gun exhibit at all because first of all it’s guns and I don’t like guns but second I just really don’t like thinking about what guns can be used for (hunting and killing people and scaring people) and third it had a bunch of different kinds of ammo, which just made me freak out more. It made me think about what might happen if a thief broke into one of the exhibits and stole the guns and ammo because it had matched up ammo for each gun. They’d only have one shot, but STILL!

Then we went to a really cool presentation about raptors, which talked about a golden eagle and a red-tailed hawk. The golden eagle and the red-tailed hawk were alive and right in front of us. The presenter talked about how the birds got injured and that their injuries are why they can’t live in the wild. The golden eagle was hit by a semi-truck and had wing damage and the red-tailed hawk was hit by a car, which caused it to be injured on the right side of its face. The people then had to do surgery on it to take out its right eye so it could be more comfortable. Yikes!!!!!!!!!!! Even though I Don’t Like Zoos, I was okay with the Raptor Museum because the birds had been injured and couldn’t be released into the wild because they would die and it is better to have them in captivity than dead.

Then we went to a natural history exhibit where we saw a video about wolves being put back into Yellowstone, a video about beavers, and a video about forest fires. We also saw an exhibit about prairie dogs, and that was cool because we saw real live wild prairie dogs at The Badlands (which weren’t actually very bad).

Then wewent to the coffee shop for Sissy’s FREE ICE CREAM! Sissy let me eat some. See my hand?

Then we went home to write blog posts. I would recommend this museum to my friends.