Tags
Art in Bend Oregon, Bend Oregon, Big cats, Bobcat, Bronze statues of deer, Lynx, Oregon High Desert Museum
Today we went out to Oregon’s High Desert Museum of Wildlife and Living History. It was a splendid museum and lived up to the surprisingly high artistic standards of this remote little city. Not only were the building structures of excellent quality and taste, but sprinkled about were well done bronze life-size statues of native animals in natural settings.
Statue in the Oregon High Desert Museum of fighting buck deer in bronze. Google Earth at 43.9661 -121.3421
Oregon High Desert Museum resting buck deer done in bronze
Oregon High Desert Museum old Owyhee County ballot box
This ballot box intrigued me because my mother, her parents, and I too, lived in Owyhee County when young. Our home then was 200 miles across the almost uninhabited high desert from this museum. They arrived there in 1910 but by then Idaho was already a state. My granddad was usually a minor elected politician in local offices like the Grange and County Road Commissioner and may have seen or used this voting barrel, but probably not. Then again even now the Owyhee county has only eleven thousand residents, and Homedale, when I attended 1st grade in a three room schoolhouse there in 1940, was still the largest city in Owyhee county at 857 people. When my grandparents arrived it was only 100 people, so maybe he did use this voting barrel.
The Eidemiller brothers and their wives about 1912
Inside there were many exhibits about the history and ecology of the local area, but I was caught first by the big cats. Here is me and a bobcat; note the little kid.
Me and a bobcat in the Oregon High Desert Museum.
The toddler seems to think this twenty pound bobcat is a nice little kitty.
A lynx named Snowshoe in the Oregon High Desert Museum
This white footed lynx named Snowshoe is more like forty pounds but when the museum acquired him several years ago he had been detoothed, declawed, abandoned and left for dead. He is their favorite cat now.
The museum has several dioramas and lots of artifacts collected from various periods of Oregon history. We must go back and see more of the changing exhibits. It is only five miles south of Bend on Highway 97.
Museums are a quick and easy way to get an appreciation of our world.
