Plight at the Museum
“LET ME SHOW YOU SOME OF my favorite things,” says Bill Green.
It’s just before 10 on a chilly October morning, and we’re standing in the entryway to the Panhandle-Plains Historical Museum in Canyon, 19 miles south of Amarillo. Outside, on the campus of West Texas A&M University, students hurry to class in a persistent drizzle. Inside, museum employees are arriving, and several stop to say hello to Green, who was the history curator here from 1993 to 2010 and still wears his staff name tag. Now 75, he walks slowly and speaks quietly, but there’s an intensity to his piercing hazel eyes, which quickly scan whichever artifact or person he’s studying. Green, who has a neatly trimmed white mustache and wears suspenders over a plaid shirt, still works as a freelance public historian; he regularly makes the two-hour drive to another museum in Canadian, where he’s curating an exhibit on the history of Hemphill County.
Today he’s only got an hour to spare, and he doesn’t want to waste a minute on small talk. As he ushers me into the galleries, he reels off a litany of the museum’s collections: “History, natural history, Native Americans, anthropology, we have paleontology, world-class art, textiles, petroleum, automobiles, windmills.” Yet few Texans know that this is the state’s largest history museum, by both number of artifacts (nearly 3 million) and square footage (285,000). Its scope includes not just Texas, but the entire Panhandle-Plains region — a vast swath of land extending into Oklahoma, New Mexico and Colorado.
The first exhibit most visitors see is “People of the Plains,” which Green helped design. Its breadth is sweeping: arrowheads made by the region’s earliest inhabitants, who arrived 14,000 years ago, sit not far from
