On Saturday, the Gene Autry Museum opens its premiere exhibition for the year, Empire and Liberty: The Civil War and the West.
“Empire and Liberty” is going to blow some minds. It did mine.
I thought the Civil War was tangential to Western history. This exhibition proves otherwise. The curators say that “you cannot understand the Civil War without addressing the significance of the West.”
This month marks the 150th anniversary of Appomattox, the Virginia courthouse where the war formally concluded.
The show looks at westward expansion, starting as early as the Louisiana Purchase in 1803.
It shows how questions of citizenship and slavery impacted each new territory and state.
Using evocative objects and compelling individual stories — a pioneer suffragette, an Indian weaver, an escaped slave — the exhibition presents the arc of the nation’s westward movement, the Civil War itself, and the Reconstruction years that followed.
Empire and Liberty presents a complex mise en scene. The show takes a wide view of slavery, including indentured labor and human trafficking, and implicates familiar episodes such as the Gold Rush, the transcontinental railroad, and the Trail of Tears as linked to various forms of forced labor.
The Lewis and Clark party included a black slave and Sacagawea, kidnapped from the Shoshone, sold and married to a mixed blood French interpreter.
Even John Sutter of Sutter’s Mill was trafficking native women and children.
The exhibition illustrates how other 19th century conflicts connect to the Civil War — including the U.S.-Mexican War, the war for Texas, and the Indian wars — and depicts Western outlaws, such as Jesse James, as aggrieved Confederates.
It’s a rich story, propelled by more than 200 engrossing artifacts.
Highlights include an iron slave collar, a life mask of Abraham Lincoln, Ulysses S. Grant’s engraved revolver, a hand-colored lantern slide from the Ft. Laramie Peace Commission, a field surgery kit, an Indian painting of the Battle of Little Big Horn, slave bills of sale and buffalo soldiers’ parade flag.
The exhibition design sets the scene with lively period colors and lettering, and interactive, multi-media elements incorporate daguerrotypes and original music.
The exhibition is on view through Jan. 3.
Throughout its run, there will be a events, such as a quilting bee, a chance to try out black-powder firearms, films and seminars, and a demonstration of 19th-century plate photography.
Ms. Klapper may be contacted at the Autry katie@katieklapper.com
