National Cowboy & Western Heritage Museum

Roadside & scenic

Built in 1898 and saved from collapse in the 1990s by an 80-something-year-old master builder and a crew of volunteers, this perfectly circular wooden barn is one of the most-photographed buildings on the entire Mother Road.

Roadside & scenic

A 21-foot fiberglass 'muffler man' in a space helmet and cowboy boots landed outside a repurposed 1950s gas station on Tulsa's 11th Street in 2019 -- the newest giant on Route 66, built to celebrate the road's next hundred years.

Landmark

At noon on April 22, 1889, a gunshot turned an empty prairie into a land grab of 50,000 people on horseback and covered wagon. Sculptor Paul Moore spent over two decades casting that single frozen moment in bronze -- 45 larger-than-life figures mid-gallop along the Bricktown Canal, forever racing toward a stake in the ground.

Roadside & scenic

Retired woodworking teacher Ed Galloway spent 11 years by hand building the world's largest concrete totem pole -- 90 feet tall, resting on a giant turtle, covered in 200 painted bas-relief images -- on his farm near Foyil, then kept building smaller totems and a fiddle-shaped studio until he died in 1962.

Museum

The 175-foot earthen mound rising beside FAM's entrance is deliberately aligned to the cardinal directions, tying the building's architecture to the shared origin stories of Oklahoma's 39 First American nations housed inside.

Landmark

Robert E. Lee, Zachary Taylor, and Jefferson Davis all walked this ground before they were famous. Built in 1824 as the Army's westernmost outpost, Fort Gibson anchored the end of the Trail of Tears and kept an uneasy peace on the frontier for over 50 years without a single battle at the fort itself -- reconstructed log buildings and a stone garrison still stand for visitors to walk through today.