Spotlight on Museums

High Desert Museum

Robert Boyd

59800 S. Highway 97 Bend, Oregon 97702-7963 Phone 541-382-4754; Fax 541-382-5256 E-mail: info@highdesertmuseum.org Web site: www.highdesertmuseum.org
The High Desert Museum opened to the public in 1982, the culmination of the vision of its founder and first President Donald M. Kerr. For over twenty years, the museum's mission has been to tell the story of the region's natural and cultural history. A continuing goal has been to promote through its exhibits thoughtful, informed decision making that will sustain the natural resources, communities, and cultures of the arid Intermountain West.	1
As the High Desert Museum has expanded, it has made efforts whenever possible to blend experiences and interpretation that most often appear separately, within zoos, at historical museums, and on nature and wildlife refuges. For example, visitors will find within the museum's walls an exhibit on the Native People of the Columbia Plateau that contains both a 1960s reservation home and a view of live sturgeon in a re-creation of their Columbia River habitat. The Donald M. Kerr Birds of Prey Center gives the visitor a "birds-eye view" of the birds of prey of the High Desert, some in a natural setting and others in the context of a contemporary ranch yard with irrigation equipment, fuel drums, and a corner of a barn.	2
To supplement the stories of the region and its people, the museum has presented a variety of changing exhibits over the past two decades. The emphasis is on how the resources of this landscape of rimrock and sagebrush, together with the diverse people who have made their lives here, combined to create a history that belongs to this part of the West. On June 13, 2003, over four hundred guests gathered at the museum to celebrate a special chapter in the region's history — the opening of Buckaroo! The Hispanic Heritage of the High Desert. Buckaroo! celebrates the culture of the California vaqueros and their influence on the cattle ranches of the High Desert.	3
With his proud pose and classic vaquero gear, Rafael "Chappo" Remudas, shown here at the P Ranch in about 1890, is representative of the horsemen who transplanted the traditions of Californios to the High Desert. Courtesy of Harney County Museum, photograph collection, Burns, Oregon
The roots of the buckaroo culture reach back across a thousand years and three continents. The Moors carried the equestrian customs of North Africa to Spain, where they merged with those of Spanish horsemen and eventually came to the Americas with the conquistadors. The first vaqueros worked on the vast ranchos of Mexico, and in 1769 Mexican vaqueros came north to California with the Portola Expedition. An economy based on cattle developed on the coastal hillsides and inland valleys of present-day California. In the early nineteenth century, the ranchos and missions began commerce in hides and tallow with New England sea traders. The commodity was cattle, but horses were at the center of the culture. The people of this region called themselves Californios, and they trained Indians and mestizos as vaqueros to manage the vast herds on their land grant ranchos. Between 1769 and the onset of American rule in 1848, the vaqueros developed distinctive horseback customs for working cattle. Their gear was finely crafted from materials at hand — rawhide, horsehair, and leather — and their silver inlaid bits and spurs reflected a pride in the skills of their calling.	4
By the 1850s much of the California rangeland was in the hands of Anglo-American entrepreneurs, but vaqueros continued to do the daily work on the ranches. In the late 1860s, responding to the dual pressures of an extended drought and new laws restricting open-range ranching, California stockmen looked beyond the Sierra for new rangeland. Men such as John Devine, the Altube brothers, Peter French, and Henry Miller established ranches across northern Nevada, eastern Oregon, and in the Owyhee country of Idaho. The vaqueros who drove the herds to the High Desert brought with them their Californio ways of training horses, their single-rigged Visalia saddles, hackamores, spade bits, and hand-braided rawhide reatas. On the High Desert they shared their ways with a new generation of horsemen — Irish immigrant boys in Lake County, sons of Basque sheepherders, Paiute and Western Shoshone Indians, and even a few African American cowboys who came to the region with trail drives.	5
By the early twentieth century, the vaqueros who first came to the High Desert — such as Chino Berdugo, Juan Redon, Rafael Remudas, and Lolo Munoz — were no longer active in ranch work. Taking their places were riders who preserved the California horseback traditions but called themselves buckaroos. A century later, buckaroos are still on traditional ranches such as the Whitehorse and Spanish ranches and the YP, IL, and ZX. Buckaroo! is the story of this cultural migration, a continuing horseback way of life that is still important in this part of the West.	6
The two-thousand-square-foot exhibit traces the evolution of buckaroos through their gear, clothing, and personal items and through historic photographs. There is also a stunning collection of contemporary images of landscape, architecture, and buckaroos by photographers Kurt Markus and Charles Blakeslee.	7
Future exhibits at the High Desert Museum include Fire, the natural and cultural history of wildfire in the High Desert; Lines on the Land, the history of cartography and art that defined the region in the era of exploration after Lewis and Clark; and an expansion of the Earle A. Chiles Center on the Spirit of the West. This extension of the museum's popular walk through High Desert history will take visitors through the twentieth century with scenes ranging from the homestead era and the Great Depression to the home front during World War II and the growth of the region's recreational industry.	8

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