Range Riders Museum: Where the Range Riders Remember
Established in 1939, the Range Riders Museum is one of the oldest and largest museums of its kind in the West: a 13-building complex on the west end of Miles City that gathers up the cowboy, homesteader, and Native American history of eastern Montana under - and this is the important detail - very little air conditioning.
The Collection
The heart of the museum is the original 2,800-square-foot log memorial hall, but the complex sprawls: homesteader cabins, a schoolhouse, a chapel, barns full of brand-new-old farm machinery, and thousands of photographs documenting the open-range cattle era. The museum holds important photographic collections from the frontier photographers who recorded this country first - L.A. Huffman among them - along with saddles, brands, firearms, and the everyday artifacts of a century of range life.
Our Visit: A Heat Story
Our first stop in Miles City came on a day when the thermometer was doing its best impression of the surface of the sun, and the museum's historic buildings - authentic to the era in more ways than one - were miserably hot inside. We made it a rushed but genuine visit, breeze-through speed in the worst buildings and lingering where the shade was kind. Honest verdict: this place deserves a cool morning, and we would gladly go back for one. The volunteer energy that keeps 13 buildings alive is something special, and the collection is the real deal - not recreated, but accumulated, generation by generation.