The Wyatt Earp Experience

Lawman and outlaw, hero and villain, gambler, entrepreneur, and so much more: Wyatt Earp wore a lot of hats over the course of his long life. Best known for his role in the infamous shootout at the O.K. Corral in 1881, Wyatt Earp was also witness to several other emblematic American moments. As a teenager, he followed a wagon train across the plains and the mountains to California. He kept the law in some of the country’s wildest Western towns; he participated in several gold rushes. In his final years, he was a man about town in the earliest days of Hollywood.

Perhaps more than anything else, Earp was a man in the right place at the right time. Over the course of his long life he surfed the crest of the era of the American West, and as a result his name has become central to and inseparable from this most enduring of America’s creation myths.

That this legendary figure spent his formative years in a small Dutch town in central Iowa, however, is a surprise to most. How much did growing up in Pella shape the man Wyatt Earp became? In some ways, we can really only speculate … and that’s exactly what we set out to do!

GSM Project worked with local historians, local artists, and a dedicated team from the Pella Historical Society and Museums to dig into historical records, take stock of the impressive amount of mythology that’s out there, and to use what we had at our disposal — a historic house, some archival photos, and a great story with a magnetic main character — to paint a picture of life in Pella in the time leading up to the Civil War.

One of the major challenges of this project was the absolute scarcity of information available regarding Earp’s early days. A notoriously private man, Wyatt Earp left behind very little by way of material culture or documentation even of his adult years. His childhood days — one of nine children in an unexceptional family in a frontier town — are largely lost to history.

Without any objects that could be traced to the Earp family, we worked with diary entries, census data, historic photographs … and not much else. While a number of biographies exist on Earp, most are considered wildly speculative and only offer a few fragments of authentic material upon which scholars can generally agree.

Our approach was to create an emotional, theatrical journey, one that begins in the earliest days of Pella, and invites visitors to make their way forward through time. With an audio guide in hand, visitors listen to oral fragments delivered by a narrator, other characters from the past and present, and sometimes Wyatt Earp himself.

Each room has its own story, whether it is the Earps arriving in town to seek their fortune, young Wyatt trying to find his feet as an outsider in this Dutch community, or the young man seeking escape in the great outdoors of the American Midwest — with the country on the brink of Civil War.The audioscapes are accompanied by theatrical and often surprising environments, designed in collaboration with theatre producers Théâtre de la Pire Espèce. As visitors are invited to tiptoe their way through this creaky house, they hear the whisperings of the ghosts of the past as if the house was the stage and the visitors had stepped behind the curtain.

When Pella Historical Society and Museums came to GSM Project, they were looking for a museum partner who would help them create something that Pella had never seen before: something bold that would have their primary audiences of locals and regular visitors excited at the new offer, and a younger generation attracted to the museum for the first time.

To make sure the Wyatt Earp Experience would deliver on this requirement, we crafted a visitor experience that strikes a balance between the raw simplicity of clear, compelling storytelling — a story you could get lost in — with stunning and evocative sets, in the spirit of visual metaphors rather than historical reconstructions. This design makes Wyatt Earp's story accessible and fun, so that everyone can take some part of Wyatt Earp’s life for their own.

• Designer: GSM Project
• Co-Creative Direction & Scriptwriting: Théâtre de la Pire Espèce
• General Contractor + Fabricator: Gropen
• Contractor: Sprague Construction
• Architectural Historian: Wayne Stienstra
• Electrical Engineers: Gritters Electric Inc.
• AV & Lighting Supply & Integration: Lumen, Spectrum Integrators & XYZ
• Media Production : Kazak
• Audio-Guide: Guide-ID
• Mural Artist: Nathan T. Wright
• Modeller : Jérôme Poirier
• Transportation: Cargolution
• Metal: Métal Saint-Jean