National Cowboy & Western Heritage Museum

The best Western museum in the country, on a hilltop overlooking the city. Fifteen galleries cover the American frontier — Native American artefacts and contemporary art, working-cowboy gear, rodeo, Western film history, and a remarkable fine-art collection including Russell, Remington and the Taos school. The recreated turn-of-the-century cattle town inside the building is a child-magnet and the End of the Trail statue is genuinely moving.

Allow at least three hours. The grounds also contain the Rodeo Animal Cemetery, where champion bulls and horses are buried under marked stones — an oddly affecting detail in a museum that takes its subject matter seriously. Open daily; ticket around $15.

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The museum's centrepiece is James Earle Fraser's 'End of the Trail', the 5.5-metre plaster statue of an exhausted Native American on horseback that became one of the most-reproduced images in American art after it was shown at the 1915 San Francisco Panama-Pacific Exposition. The original was nearly lost — Fraser intended to cast it in bronze but never raised the money, and the plaster sat outside in Visalia, California, for forty years before being rescued and brought to Oklahoma.

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