Wyoming Museums Can’t Afford Historic Wild West Items So They Go To Auction

A glass negative of Butch Cassidy’s prison photo, a contract between Sitting Bull and Buffalo Bill’s “Wild West Show,” and other eye-catching pieces of Wyoming’s Wild West history are hitting the auction block. But Wyoming museums say they likely cannot afford to buy the items, and at least one historian is suspicious that the Cassidy mugshot negative is not as authentic as portrayed.

The sale, handled by RR Auction, includes 170 high-end pieces of Western Americana drawn from the private collection of former Harley-Davidson CEO Jochen Zeitz, who is selling the items to support nonprofit work in Kenya. The collection includes signed documents and letters from Wyatt Earp, Wild Bill Hickok, Kit Carson, Davy Crockett, George Custer, Annie Oakley, and Frank James.

Paul Hutton, Tate Chair of Western History and curator of the Buffalo Bill Museum and Buffalo Bill Center of the West, said the Sitting Bull contract is “like a piece of the true cross for us.” He has written to the auction house about the contract’s provenance. “It looks very authentic, but their AI email back to me was that it cannot be authenticated in terms of chain of ownership, which is very important,” he said. The museum previously flagged the document for potential purchase but did not have enough money. The contract is estimated at $125,000.

The Butch Cassidy lot includes the glass plate negative of the outlaw’s prison mugshot, described as one of only two photographs taken before the infamous Fort Worth photo that led to the gang’s downfall. Historian and Cassidy expert Mike Bell sees problems with authenticity. “The original shows a wider view of Cassidy, including part of his leg in striped pants,” he said. “The picture was then cropped to show the head and torso version that is well-known. The original Heyn plate would have been of the uncropped version. So there are two possibilities: the original plate no longer existed, so the cropped picture was rephotographed at a later date, or this is not a contemporary artifact at all and has been fabricated.”

Bell also noted that the paperwork accompanying the auction is dated after the penitentiary moved to Rawlins in 1901, raising questions about how the material came into private hands. He believes if the negatives are authentic, they likely remain the legal property of the state of Wyoming. “The prison closed at the original Rawlins location in 1981,” he said. “Did someone give away or ‘borrow’ this material at that time? Either way, if it is authentic, then it belongs to the state. If it is not, then buyer beware.”

Wyoming State Museum Director Kevin Ramler said the items are well above the museum’s acquisition budget. “It would be very cool to have those types of things in a historic collection in Wyoming,” he said. “But just looking at the signed contract, it’s estimated at $125,000. The other things are well above our acquisition budget, too, which is more like $4,000.” The Cassidy negatives have been estimated at $50,000, with bidding already at $28,624 as of the May 21 deadline.

Historian Janelle Molony said the auction proves that Western history remains of continuing interest. “If no one is interested in these items, and willing to go out of their way financially for them, then the local museums might become a thing of the past,” she said. “Auctions like these are evidence that museum collections are desirable to see. They prove the Western genre to be of continuing interest to collectors and on a bigger scale to authors, filmmakers, and television producers.”