Heritage of Great Outdoors Gets an Indoor Home in Wyoming Museum : Big game: Boone and Crockett Club’s National Collection of Heads and Horns, which includes nine world-record trophies, receives permanent resting place.

CODY, Wyo. —  A large piece of America’s outdoor heritage now has a permanent home here.

The Boone and Crockett Club’s National Collection of Heads and Horns, which includes nine world-record trophies, is part of the Cody Firearms Museum.

The big game trophies are in a 19th-Century Adirondack-style lodge 50 miles east of Yellowstone National Park.

The 31 trophies are considered the finest available specimens of their kind. Any trophy may be replaced by a better one if it becomes available.

The collection includes the L.S. Chadwick stone ram, considered by the Boone and Crockett Club as the finest North American trophy ever taken.

Painstakingly assembled to provide examples of the finest of North American big game animals, the collection was without a home in recent years, after the New York Zoological Society (Bronx Zoo) in New York, changing its focus, converted the rooms where the heads were displayed into office space. At first it couldn’t give the collection away.

Now it is part of the Buffalo Bill Historical Center, which also includes the Whitney Gallery of Western Art, the Buffalo Bill Museum and the Plains Indian Museum.

Perhaps the most striking trophy in the lodge is the Robert Swan wapiti, or American elk, taken in 1912. It spans 5 feet, 1 inch between the tips of the antlers.

William T. Hornaday began the collection in 1907, believing Americans’ great big game resources eventually would be wiped out by advancing civilization.

Events, however, proved him wrong as new world-record animals are recorded by Boone and Crockett Club scorers regularly.

He and other club members and friends raised money to build a building at the Bronx Zoo that would house the collection.

In 1977, Lowell Baier, a sportsman and member of the Boone and Crockett Club, dropped by the zoo to see the collection and, angered by its condition, began a letter-writing campaign to save and display it.

He met with William H. Nesbitt, manager of the National Rifle Assn.’s Hunting Activities Department, who would become executive director of the Boone and Crockett Club.

While they worked on a plan to save the collection, the zoo and the American Museum of Natural History in New York agreed that the museum would keep the heads in storage.

They took the problem to Sam Webb, who led the effort to design the club’s current scoring system and got the zoo and museum to turn the collection over to the Boone and Crockett Club in 1978.

It subsequently went on temporary display at the NRA Museum in Washington and later at the Buffalo Bill Museum. It found its permanent home in June, 1991.

The Boone and Crockett Club was founded in 1887 by Theodore Roosevelt and a few other sportsmen.

Throughout its history it has encouraged wildlife conservation and promoted enforceable game laws, hunter ethics programs and fair chase in hunting.