On our first night in San Antonio, Laura and I passed the Buckhorn and immediately declared it was not the type of place that we were interested in exploring. Upon further research, though, I decided it could actually be really interesting, so Laura indulged me and came along.
The Buckhorn has a really interesting history. The guy who started it started things off by trading men a shot of whiskey for their antlers. Soon he had one of the largest collections of antlers and horns of all types. Now it has all sorts of dead animals. Its kind of reminiscent of Gaston’s house in that song he sings in Beauty and the Beast, except taken to a wild extreme.
Laura and I were ushered into the establishment by this character:
Unfortunately the Buckhorn now also hosts the Texas Rangers Museum, which apparently (and after seeing it I understand why) is so unpopular that they have to use trickery to force people to see it. So we bought our tickets to the horn museum only to find out that they’re dual tickets for both museums. Then, upon entering the actual “exhibits” we were forced into the rangers part before we were allowed to see the horns. Needless to say, the trickery was not appreciated.
One of the redeeming qualities of the museum/saloon, though, was that it hosts the original saloon bar from when it was first built. Its a beautiful wooden structure, and it really has that old-timey Texas feel. Another redeeming quality is that you are encouraged to get a drink from the bar and carry it around while looking at the exhibits. Drinking in a museum? How cool is that! Laura and I had mango margaritas that were actually pretty good.
Its also interesting to note that the name Texas Longhorn is not an exaggeration, as we saw with one of the many taxidermied animals shown below.
Another gross picture: Shown below are three animal skulls. The center one is the skull of an Asian elephant, the right one is that of a hippopotamus, and I don’t remember what the left one was. Seeing the dead animals was kind of interesting, but also kind of sad.
Laura was afraid of a snake, so she wouldn’t smile for this picture of furniture made out of horns.
But she did smile for Teddy.
And I fell in love with a moose.
1 comment:
It was a Rhino skull! silly goose.
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