The Old West arrives at Bellefonte Art Museum

Everyone should have a cowboy room —Walt Petersen most certainly does.

It takes up the entire second floor of a small garage/barn next to his house in Bellefonte and is probably the only reason that a pair of chaps haven’t been hung over a mantelpiece somewhere like it’s a display window at The Gap.

Peterson’s menagerie of frontier antiquities encompasses a broad spectrum of the western experience while also managing to exemplify a degree of specificity that one has come to expect from today’s breed of collector.

The funeral saddle? It turns out that was a thing. Actually, if you were a dead cowboy, it was a big thing.

“They took the saddle and they took one stirrup off,” Peterson said.

Curious city-folk can see for themselves starting Sunday at the Bellefonte Art Museum for Centre County.

An exhibit titled “Saddle Up: Art and Artifacts of the Old West” will run through the end of September, mixing paintings, relics and a dash of old Hollywood to capture some of that new frontier fever.

That bug’s not easy to catch here in nittany lion country. Patricia House, the museum’s executive director, had to scour local collections for just the right pieces, lest history suffer the indignity of John Wayne arriving at the scene of a shootout on an antique tractor.

“I found enough for the show but it was difficult,” House said.

Having friends like Peterson helped.

Among the items he loaned to the show is an 1873 Winchester, which apparently was the firearm back in the day.

“They’re the guns that won the west,” Peterson said.

He himself didn’t win the West so much as inherit it.

Peterson’s cowboy room is comprised mostly of items bequeathed by a deceased cousin, a nod to a shared boyhood spent enthralled by western mythology, prepackaged and delivered from town to town courtesy of silver screen legends in the vein of Roy Rogers and Gene Autry.

“It sort of struck a cord of people’s idea of adventures,” Peterson said.

Adulthood is as gravity to youthful flights of fancy and Peterson’s perception of the cowboy mythos has since been tempered by the arduous realities of the trek out west and the native peoples who paid the price.

Navigating the dichotomy between the romance and grit of the west has been part of the challenge for House, who charged herself with creating an immersive representation of the period as it exists both in the textbooks and the annals of Netflix.

To that end, musician Richard Sleigh will play guitar and sing at 1 p.m. Sunday. A few weeks later at 1 p.m. Sept. 10, Nashville’s Rowen Casey will provide some background fiddling.

“I think that you’re really going to feel it,” House said.

This story was originally published August 3, 2017 at 2:54 PM with the headline "The Old West arrives at Bellefonte Art Museum."