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Museum for cowboys and Indians opens

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Cowboys and Indians have called a rare truce. They fought viciously in battles immortalized in Hollywood movies, but now a museum in Oklahoma is bringing them together to tell the true American West story.

Just before sunset in Guthrie Oklahoma, a gunfight breaks out.

This is what many of us imagine when we talk about cowboys.

Western films always play with the same popular images fist fights, knife fights, gunfights and of course, Indians. The two go hand-in-hand.

Cowboy Jim Rawlins said, "Anybody who has read any history at all knows that the cowboys and the Indians, they were together. I mean it was always either they were fighting or friendly."

Jim Rawlins, a cowboy buff for more than fifty years, says that playing cowboys and Indians has a deeper message than just fighting.

Cowboy Jim Rawlins said, "I play cowboy so I want them to learn more about the way cowboys were and what they did. The trail drives, the fist fights, the knife fights, the gunfights, the friendliness, the farming, the, you know, the cattle raising, every bit of it. As well as the Indians, they taught us an awful lot."

Cowboy Jim Robins said, "Both of the two culturesthough they clashed at times in the past, they evolved into a culture that everybody can be respectful of each other and that's the key to the whole thing."

Cowboy and Indian cultures ended up influencing the other greatly. That's the message at the National Cowboy and Western Heritage Museum in Oklahoma city.

The museum only changed its name recently. A few years ago it was still called the Cowboy Hall of Fame.

The name-change marked a shift in focus from just cowboys, to include others and welcome their stories.

Museum director Ken Schroeder said, "We are an institution that is dedicated to preserving and interpreting, that is telling the story of the evolving cultures of the American West. And we couldn't do that by boxing ourselves strictly around the Cowboy."

Now the museum is full of typical cowboy artefacts like guns and hats right alongside native American ones.

Schroeder says he never tires of surprising guests, who often come expecting only the cowboy story.