Big Timbers Museum Collection

The Big Timbers Museum Collection includes artifacts spanning from Paleo Indians to the last Cheyenne and Arapaho in the region, with a Sand Creek collection of bullets, arrowheads, cannonball fragments, and campsite artifacts that forms the largest display of artifacts from the Sand Creek Massacre. Its holdings also include material related to Buffalo Bill's Wild West Show, in which more than a thousand Indians performed over a thirty-three-year run in reenactments of raids on settlers, wagon trains, and stagecoaches. Among its military items are a Civil War ten-star National Flag, one of no more than ten known to exist, captured by Corporal James A. Smith of Company F, 17th Illinois Infantry Regiment at Vicksburg, Mississippi, an extensive World War One poster collection, a restored U.S. Army escort wagon representing military traffic on the Santa Fe Trail, a horse-drawn fire wagon with fire hose carts, and a variety of buggies, carriages, historic newspapers, and photographs. The collection also preserves the history of Lamar's Madonna of the Trail statue, one of twelve placed on the National Old Trails Road to honor the pioneer spirit of women in the nation's westward expansion; August Leimbach, a German born in 1882, designed the statue, and Harry S. Truman, as president of the National Old Trails Road Association, helped choose Lamar because of its pioneer spirit and the historical significance of Big Timbers. It includes the story of Mary Sullivan Cain, selected as Pioneer Mother for the unveiling; born in Ireland in 1860, she came to Big Timbers in 1872, married Felix Cain in 1885, and homesteaded on Butte Creek near Lamar. Other items include a wedding gown from the House of Worth, whose founder Charles Worth became known as the father of haute couture, and antiques and classic automobiles such as a 1927 Buick owned by the Fleagle family that resembled the car used in the Fleagle Gang robbery of the First National Bank of Lamar on May 23, 1928, the first case in FBI history in which a single fingerprint was used to prosecute a case.

Colorado · United States