Arlan Ettinger, president of Guernsey’s, announcing the final auction figures on Tuesday afternoon at City Hall.
In an old farmhouse outside Elkhorn, Wisconsin, on the other side of a wooden gate framed by teepees and covered wagons, is a dinner theater and museum known as Watson’s Wild West.
“We’re supposedly one of a kind,” said Doug Watson, who founded the museum with his wife in 1989, after taking a college business course. “There’s general stores, and there’s Wild West museums, but we’re the only one that’s both.”
Watson furnished the museum with his personal collection, a hoard of saddles, tin cans, wheels, print advertisements and other artifacts that he amassed over a period of 34 years. “You see, when I started collecting, I collected the real stuff,” he said. “It was kind of readily available back then, but it’s harder to find now. You gotta work at it.”
The website for Watson’s Wild West, with two high-resolution panoramic shots and a YouTube video montage, displays something like what former Harrisburg Mayor Stephen Reed must have been picturing when—largely in secret, and with public money—he steadily stockpiled Western artifacts in the hopes of opening a museum here.
There are elk heads and bison heads, pistols and rifles, copper pots and tea kettles, spoked wooden wheels. General admission is five dollars for adults and three dollars for children. Dinner packages, with actors portraying characters like Annie Oakley and Mark Twain, help Watson make good on one of his museum’s mottoes: “You don’t have to go to South Dakota to enjoy the Old West.”
For the foreseeable future, however, you will still have to go at least as far as Wisconsin. This afternoon in City Hall, Mayor Linda Thompson, along with Arlan Ettinger, president of Guernsey’s, the auction house that managed the seven-day sale on City Island, closed the grim chapter in Harrisburg history that was Reed’s Wild West fantasy.
In an auction that Ettinger described as “one of the largest auctions of anything ever,” with nearly 3,700 lots and over 10,000 registered bidders, the city netted $2,577,911, out of a total sale of $3,143,795. (The difference, $565,884, or 18%, is what Guernsey will make on commission.)
Thompson announced that Harrisburg’s take would allow the city to complete payments on an outstanding loan from 2007, which Reed had taken to help cover a $14 million budget deficit, using the artifacts as collateral.
“The city of Harrisburg does pay its debts,” Thompson said. She urged residents to think of the auction as marking a transition into a period of “post-recovery.”
“Symbolically, this auction clears the air of a lot of old history,” she added.
In addition to “two or three” lots that went unsold, Ettinger said, there remain hundreds of items, mostly paper ephemera, that the city intends to auction in New York in September. Excluding the expected income from their sale, the city’s gains from last week’s auction, when combined with two earlier sales of objects from the collection, is just over $4.1 million—about half of the $8.3 million Reed is estimated to have spent on the objects in the first place.
Describing a scene of “massive enthusiasm,” however, with bidders from every state and over 40 countries, Ettinger suggested the auction could only be viewed in a positive light. “There’s nothing to be unhappy about, nothing to be embarrassed about, only something to be proud of,” he said.
When asked to assess the overall quality of the collection, Ettinger chose his words carefully. “There was treasure, and I won’t say ‘trash’—I’ll say ‘decorative objects.’” He described Reed’s collecting style as “machine-gun acquisition.”
“If you shoot enough bullets, you’re gonna hit some targets and miss others,” he said.
Perhaps, as with many outcomes in the Old West, the fate of Reed’s collection really does come down to shooting styles.
“The thing is not to buy just anything, but things that fit your theme,” Doug Watson said. But despite his history of avid collecting, when it came to the Reed collection, Watson passed. On Monday night, he attended a party where “everyone was talking about” Harrisburg’s auction. “They said to me, ‘We’re wondering why you didn’t go!’ But I already have pretty much everything I need.”
