What was the Buffalo Museum of America?
Scottsdale has had grand museums and odd ones. The Buffalo Museum of America was one of the odd ones: a museum of bison and the Wild West in a strip mall at the southeast corner of Scottsdale Road and Shea Boulevard. When Phoenix New Times named it the Valley’s “Best Unknown Tourist Attraction” in 2003, it had stuffed buffalo and animatronic buffalo families, a wax Jesse James, a room for Buffalo Bill with one of his hunting rifles, and the prop buffalo from Dances With Wolves.
Its owner by then was Gary Martinson, a homebuilder who called his company Bison Homes and had bought the collection from an Arizona family. In October 2007 he moved it to the top floor of his company’s offices near the Airpark and reopened it as the Bison Museum, with a newly rescued collection of Western art.
Both are gone now, and the collection has been split up in northern Arizona.
The two museums
The strip mall. New Times’s 2003 write-up is the best description of the original: the taxidermy, the wax figures, the Buffalo Bill room, Gemmie E. Baker’s personal Wild West collection, the movie prop and a gift shop. Nobody we’ve found names who started it or when. By 2007, the East Valley Tribune wrote, it was “languishing.”
The Bison Museum. Martinson reopened the collection on October 13, 2007, on the top floor of the Bison Homes building at 16641 N. 91st St., in an office park south of Bell Road. He combined it with the Western art of the Flagg family, which Neil King had rescued from a storage locker, and hired Sid Kramer, who had designed exhibits for Disneyland and Rawhide, to build it out. Visitors found a saloon diorama with Jesse James, Calamity Jane and Wild Bill Hickok, a Dee Flagg carving of Buffalo Bill, works attributed to Remington, Clymer and Catlin, bison-hide clothing, player pianos, a white bison head, a Sharps rifle and singing bison.
After. True West, in a 2015 profile of Martinson, traced the collection to Bison Ranch in Heber-Overgaard, back to Scottsdale, to the Grand Canyon and to his home in Show Low, with about a third of it at Porter Mountain Steakhouse in Lakeside.
The sources, and the gaps
Main sources: Phoenix New Times’s Best of Phoenix 2003; the East Valley Tribune in September 2007 and May 2008; the Christian Science Monitor in January 2008; and True West’s 2015 profile, read only in search excerpts.
What’s unsettled:
- The founder and opening year of the Buffalo Museum of America.
- The purchase. 1999 by the Monitor and True West; about 1997 by the Tribune.
- The address. We have the corner but no street number; our map point is approximate.
- The closings. When the strip-mall museum shut, and when the Bison Museum did, aren’t in anything we found.
Where the answers are. The Arizona Republic and Scottsdale Tribune archives for the 1990s, and the strip mall’s tenant history.
Why it matters
Scottsdale sold the West through its resorts and steakhouses, and also through small private museums like this one, built around one collector’s enthusiasm. The Buffalo Museum of America was never famous, which was New Times’s point in 2003. Like many collector’s museums, it lasted only as long as its owner could keep it open.