Museum of the Western Prairie

County museum on settlement, agriculture and the Dust Bowl in southwestern Oklahoma

The Museum of the Western Prairie tells the story of southwestern Oklahoma — from the Kiowa and Comanche era through the Land Run, the cotton and wheat economy, the Dust Bowl, and the founding of Altus Air Force Base. It is the kind of well-funded county museum that small American towns produce when they take their history seriously, and the curation is good: clear chronology, real artefacts (Native American tools, settler farm equipment, military uniforms), and a reconstructed half-dugout house on the grounds showing how the first homesteaders actually lived.

The museum is part of the Oklahoma Historical Society network, which keeps standards high and admission low (free, as of last check). Allow about an hour. It is on the eastern edge of town off Memorial Drive — easy to combine with a drive out to Altus Air Force Base or a stop at Altus City Park.

things to do museum
A story
The museum sits on the former site of the original Frisco Trail, the cattle route that brought Texas longhorns north through the Oklahoma Territory in the late 1880s. The half-dugout house out back is a faithful reconstruction of the kind of partly-underground sod dwelling that the first settlers in this stretch of the prairie actually lived in — half buried in the earth for insulation against the brutal swing between summer heat and winter cold.