The Cover

The lively and distinctive cowboy design featured on the 8.5-by-10-cm Irving H. "Larry" Larom (1889-1973) bookplate of the McCracken Research Library was adapted in 1992 from an old carved and painted wooden sign from the Valley Ranch near Cody, Wyoming. Quite literally nestled in the Rocky Mountains at the head of the South Fork of the Shoshone River in northwestern Wyoming, the Valley Ranch was a popular and influential dude ranch operated by Larry Larom. This design was chosen to recognize contributions from the Larom estate to the McCracken Research Library's acquisitions fund and is representative of the vitality of western images.

The McCracken Research Library is a museum library, part of the Buffalo Bill Historical Center (BBHC) in Cody, Wyoming. The historical center began as the Buffalo Bill Memorial Association with the purpose of honoring the history and spirit of William F. "Buffalo Bill" Cody (1846-1917). Now, eighty-six years later, the dream of a Buffalo Bill memorial has evolved into a major educational complex composed of the McCracken Research Library and five museums dedicated to the study of the American West: the Buffalo Bill Museum, the Whitney Gallery of Western Art, the Plains Indian Museum, the Cody Firearms Museum, and the Draper Museum of Natural History. The McCracken Research Library, dedicated in 1980 and named for the first BBHC director, Harold McCracken (1894-1983), maintains collections for the study of western art, literature, and music, Buffalo Bill and western history, Native American culture, firearms history, and the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem natural history.

The archival records of William F. Cody and Buffalo Bill's Wild West (BBWW) are a foundation collection for the library. As an established real-life, dime novel, and theatrical hero, Buffalo Bill forged a lasting claim to fame with his creation of Buffalo Bill's Wild West in 1882. For thirty-four years Buffalo Bill's Wild West brought the West to the world by means of a fabulous traveling show featuring authentic western history and culture as he understood it. This archival collection consists of correspondence, BBWW advertising literature and business records, Buffalo Bill photographs, a major Buffalo Bill dime novel collection, and scrapbooks of Annie Oakley (1860-1926) and other BBWW performers.

Other major collections held by the McCracken Research Library include the archives of western artists W. H. D. Koerner (1878-1938), A. Phimister Proctor (1860-1950), and Frank Tenney Johnson (1874-1939); of western photographers L. A. Huffman (1854-1931), Charles Belden (1887-1966), and Jack Richard (1909-92); the office files and engineering drawings of the Winchester Repeating Arms Company; and the BBHC Archives, which include audiotapes of the annual Cowboy Songs and Range Ballads symposium. Ranching histories include not only cattle and sheep operations but the cultural history of the cowboy way of life such as early rodeo, the creation of the dude ranch and tourist industry in the West as shown in the Larry Larom Collection of the Valley Ranch, and early western environmental conservation efforts.

The McCracken is a noncirculating research collection. An OCLC library, the McCracken actively participates in BCR and the WYLD library network, having changed over from a card catalog to an online catalog system in 1998. Current holdings are approximately twenty-five thousand volumes of books and journals, thirteen hundred linear feet of manuscripts, two hundred linear feet of Winchester engineering drawings, over three hundred videocassettes, and over six hundred reels of microfilm from the Yale Western Americana Collection of historic books.

With a staff of two full-time and two part-time professional librarians/archivists and a half-time administrative assistant, the McCracken Research Library benefits tremendously from a loyal corps of volunteers. This staffing is supplemented by one or two college interns per year who learn to process manuscript collections.

In library-public interactions...