Historical Preservation – Part Two
STEVE CHAMBERS, TEXAS ARCHITECT, VISITS A STORIED COLLECTION
As part of its corporate mission, Chambers Architects works to preserve culture and history… and highlight the people we meet who have similar interests. This is the second article in a series about an individual intent on historic preservation. Jim Gordon didn’t start out to create a history museum with firearms. In fact, his story is not about firearms at all, but about the history of the people who inhabited this country: Native Americans, lawmen, explorers, Union and Confederate soldiers, ranchers, settlers, Spanish, Mexican, and English. And how they found themselves struggling for something, against all odds, on the frontiers of North America. How he collects and preserves things is more important than any one of the physical objects. His private collection completes an understanding of his country.
Story continued in link below gallery…
The gallery below: photos of the extensive collection of paraphernalia from the Lewis and Clark Expedition; the gear and journals of explorer and travel writer, George Frederick Ruxton, who wrote about America’s expansion during the policy of Manifest Destiny; a Bowie knife owned by a Mexican General who fought at the Alamo; firearms and military equipment from the French and Indian Wars; the gear of Western trappers, traders, and ranchers; curator Jeff Hengesbaugh; Native American and Spanish Colonial artifacts; an extensive collection of Red Ryder BB guns and collectible toys.
We are all on a journey, a personal odyssey, somewhere. The American movement westward is filled with stories of both wanting a home and yearning to wander. Jim Gordon found himself in the stories of the American West. He grew up on a small ranch in what is now Plano, Texas. He worked the ranch alongside his dad and loved Western movies. When he was seven years old, he inherited his grandpa’s Winchester rifle. “I practically slept with that gun every night,” Jim recalls. “You could shoot anywhere out in the country and not hurt a thing. When I was ten, my dad let me buy my own gun and I began to realize that there was history connected to these specific objects. And so began my fascination with the stories that firearms could tell me about important events in our American history.”
“As a young boy, I realized that ranching was very hard work. I thought I’d better go to college and get a good job, a desk job. I enrolled at the University of Texas in Austin. While there, I saved what money I could and took trips to Mexico where I found really old guns for 50 pesos, about $4. By the time I got out of college, I probably had 100 old guns. The more I studied these guns, my interest grew in early American life and the frontier. A man could not be on the frontier without a gun, for food and his own protection. The rifle was a working tool.”
Jim Gordon owns one of the finest private history museum in the United States. Jeff Hengesbaugh helped him curate his extensive collection of artifacts from the American frontiers.
Jim Gordon finally got his job out of college, at a large Dallas CPA firm. He sat at a desk and became very successful. But he was restless. A serious car accident put him in bed long enough to re-think his life choices. “If I could go anywhere, where would I want to be? Probably not back at a desk.” He wrestled with ideas about Australia and other places outside the U.S. but realized that heart was in Colorado, on a ranch. He bought his first dude ranch and found that he loved the people and the everyday work in the outdoors. So, he eventually bought five more. Today, his children manage this very successful business. He now lives at the edge of Santa Fe. His private history museum is in an old abandoned schoolhouse. And this is where we met him.
The artifacts within the old school speak volumes about the development and civilization of the U.S. frontier. The first room in his museum pays homage to the American frontier that lay along the Great Lakes, beyond the Mississippi River and into the Rocky Mountains, continuously pushing westward, coast-to-coast. There were actually several frontiers: trading, ranching, farming, and mining. Advancing at different rates, each frontier was stoked by the development and refinement of objects that, in retrospect, tell a complete history of the experience and experiment.
The next room we enter illustrates one of the central stories of U.S. history, the Lewis and Clark Expedition or Corps of Discovery, commissioned by President Thomas Jefferson. Sometimes we talk about this expedition as the great American Odyssey. The effect of this phase of action in the frontier upon the northern section of the United States is realized in the highly developed seaboard cities like Boston, New York, and Baltimore. A rivalry began for what was called an “extensive trade of a rising empire.” Legislation of the frontier developed a powerful national government.
As the frontier moved westward, trappers and hunters moved ahead of settlers, searching out new supplies of beaver and other skins for shipment to Europe. The hunters were the first Europeans in much of the Old West and they formed the first working relationships with the Native Americans in the West. They added extensive knowledge of the Northwest terrain, including the important South Pass through the central Rocky Mountains. Discovered about 1812, it later became a major route for settlers to Oregon and Washington. By 1820, a new “brigade-rendezvous” system sent company men cross-country on long expeditions. “Free trappers” were also encouraged to explore new regions on their own. At the end of the gathering season, the trappers would “rendezvous” and turn in their goods for pay at river ports along the Green River, the Upper Missouri, and the Upper Mississippi. St. Louis eventually became the biggest roundup of them all.
The heritage of the U.S. frontier, replaced more than a century ago by industrialization, is still evident in the shaping of American values. The expression of individual freedom and self-reliance in their purest and most extreme forms were seen on the frontier. Out West, people tended to treat each other as social equals, unlike in many places in the eastern regions of the country. What mattered most was what a man could do in his own lifetime. They used to say, “what’s above the ground is more important than what’s beneath the ground.” Little notice was made of ancestry or family background. It also meant that a new beginning was offered for many who sought it. There was a continuing need for new farmers, skilled workers, merchants, lawyers, and political leaders. The frontier put to test the American ideals of individual freedom, self-reliance, and equality of opportunity. It enlarged these ideals and made them workable. And they became national values.
By the time we find ourselves in the museum’s third room, we realize that if the Lewis and Clark Expedition was the U.S. odyssey, The Civil War was our country’s Iliad. Firearms, uniforms, journals, and the personal effects of soldiers who fought it disclose a long and painful story that continues into the present. Crutches and guns are displayed side-by-side. The morning is waning and there are still more history vignettes in the compartments of Jim’s museum left to explore. But, it’s already clear to us that one man’s passion to collect the implements of our country’s westward movement accomplishes what any good museum strives to do. Use its curatorial expertise to demonstrate, but not tell you what to think. It’s just there. Fertile ground is cultivated by the closeness between an object and a viewer.
