California history

Myself, wearing a brown cowboy hat, a green patchwork cowboy shirt, with a red tee underneath reading "Red Dog Saloon" and featuring a cartoon image of a dog, and green courdory pants, standing in front of a museum exhibit wall that has a large image of a bear wearing a pink cowboy hat, and text reading "Imagined Wests If you close your eyes and picture ‘the American West,’ what do you see? A desert landscape? A frontier town and tumbleweeds? National parks and majestic mountains? How about the Kansas prairies, the forests of the Olympic Peninsula, or the Hawaiian Islands? Do you picture a cowboy on horseback? Native Americans? Or the variety of people in Los Angeles or another Western city? This gallery explores the tales we tell about the West, both he ones we call ‘Westerns’ and the wide rage of other stories rooted in the region. Many of our ‘Imagined Wests’ - the places and characters we picture when we close our eyes - come to us through popular culture. Film and television, music and writing, visual art and fashion, performance, and even museums have given us so many Wests. When we mix these stories together, the American West may look different from our first associations. But the West has always been home to a variety of interconnected peoples and the stories we all create here."

The Autry: A Look at the American West, both Real and Fiction

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With a love of westerns, it’s no wonder one of my favorite museums in Los Angeles is The Autry, which is dedicated to the American west. Recently they opened Imagined Wests, an exhibit that showcases how the American West is presented in pop culture. In addition to Imagined Wests, there were a few other interesting exhibits,…

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Myself, wearing a black cowboy hat, black tee reading "Bounty Law" and jean shorts, leaning against a large sign reading "The Red Dog" in large red letters.

The Red Dog, the Saloon that Once Served Trigger right at the Bar

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When I first went to Pioneertown in 2014 with my dad, we wondered through a desolate western town where the only activity was dirt blowing across the street. Completely devoid of people, we peeked through the windows here and there, windows of legitimate businesses, though closed, and faux ones with pun based names such as…

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