West Texas Trail Museum

About this museum

The Texas Trail ran north from the cattle ranches of Texas through Indian Territory, across Kansas, and on into Wyoming and Montana - one of the great arteries of the open range cattle industry that transformed the American West between the Civil War and the end of the nineteenth century. Moorcroft, Wyoming sat along that trail, and the West Texas Trail Museum at the Crook County Museum complex commemorates the drives, the drovers, the cattle, and the communities that the trail created and sustained during its brief but consequential period of operation.The museum occupies a space within the larger Crook County Museum operation, which means the cattle trail story sits in dialogue with the broader history of northeastern Wyoming - homestead settlement, coal and oil development, the Northern Cheyenne and Lakota history that precedes and runs alongside the Euro - American story. The combination gives the cattle trail exhibit a context that prevents it from becoming purely mythological: this was a specific economic system operating in a specific landscape, with specific social consequences for everyone it touched.Moorcroft itself is a small community, and the museum operates on a small - community scale - knowledgeable staff, personal encounters, the kind of detailed local knowledge that no guidebook synthesizes. Visitors who arrive expecting a modest regional history operation and leave feeling that they genuinely understand something new about the Wyoming they've been driving through are the museum's most representative audience.With a 4.8 rating from 53 visitors, the West Texas Trail Museum earns consistent enthusiasm from the travelers who find it. Admission is free. Hours run Monday through Friday from 8AM to 4PM, with Saturday and Sunday closures. The museum is located at 100 East Weston Street in Moorcroft, Wyoming. More information is available at crookcountymuseum.org.