Gilcrease Museum, Tulsa (must see)

Gilcrease Museum is a museum located northwest of downtown Tulsa. The museum now houses the world's largest, most comprehensive collection of art of the American West as well as a growing collection of art and artifacts from Central and South America. The museum is named for Thomas Gilcrease, an oil man and avid art collector. The collections comprise 300,000 artifacts, covering prehistoric and historic archaeology and ethnographic materials from native American, Hispanic, pre-Columbian, and Anglo-American cultural traditions. The ethnographic and historical materials span the period from European exploration of the Americas to the current day. Especially noteworthy in the archaeological collections at

Gilcrease Museum are items from the Mississippi valley region (present-day Illinois and Arkansas), the southwestern U.S. (Colorado, New Mexico, and Arizona), and ancient Mexico. Gilcrease Museum has one of the most important collections of pre-Columbian projectile points (arrow and spear heads) in North America, and has become a resource that is regularly consulted by archaeologists. The museum also has a research facility containing sliding glass display shelves for artifacts and a computer database system to help find various pieces. This facility, the Kravis Discovery Center, also has numerous "touchable" items for a hands-on experience for its visitors. The archival collection at Gilcrease Museum contains over 100,000 books, manuscripts, documents, and maps ranging from 1494 to the present.

Using the Gilcrease collections as a guide, themed gardens have been developed on twenty-three of the museum's 460 acres. These gardens enhance the museum's collections by reflecting gardening styles and techniques from four time periods in the American West: Pre-Columbian, Pioneer, Colonial, Victorian, as well as a rock garden.