By Debby Woodin

dwoodin@joplinglobe.com

BARTLESVILLE, Okla. — It doesn’t take days of driving or hundreds of dollars to visit the Old West.

A taste of it can be found within 120 miles of Joplin in the Osage Hill country of north-central Oklahoma at Woolaroc, oilman Frank G. Phillips’ 3,700-acre ranch-turned-museum 12 miles south of Bartlesville.

Phillips was born in 1873 in Iowa, one of 10 children in a family of modest means. He started out in life as a barber but decided to press his luck in the Oklahoma oil fields after he saw opportunity there during a trip in 1904. The payoff was huge, making Phillips and his company, Phillips 66, the largest oil company in the United States in the early decades of the 20th century.

Phillips witnessed an era in technological development — from the horse-and-wagon days of frontier expansion to the modern mobility that automobiles and air travel brought. And as he lived through the changes, he saw the end looming for the romantic and beloved “Wild West,” the diversity that was the cowboy and Indian.

After he struck it rich on oil in the first decade of the 1900s, Phillips built a large home in Bartlesville. Eventually, he also established an office in New York, where the nation’s biggest oil baron was expected to transact business. He looked along the East Coast for a place to build a country home so that he could entertain the rich and famous of the day, according to Bob Fraser, Woolaroc’s chief executive officer.

On a visit back in Bartlesville, Phillips realized that his heart remained in the Osage hills and that area would make a rustic haven where he could entertain the adventurous and even transact a little business. “He always said that if he could get someone here, he could close the deal,” Fraser said of the fondness Phillips felt for the woods, lakes and rocky hills that would become the Phillips’ ranch.

“It worked wonders for him,” Fraser said of the Woolaroc ranch, built in 1925. “His guests were seeing things here they’d never seen before. He could introduce them to the chiefs, like Chief Bacon Rind, and show them buffalo, take them fishing and horseback riding.”

While he loved to hunt, he stocked the ranch with plenty of exotic animals solely for viewing entertainment. They included zebra and water buffalo. Descendants of those herds still thrive on the grounds with longhorn cattle and elk and many other animals.

Phillips died in 1950; his wife, Jane, had died two years earlier. There is a family tomb on the grounds of the ranch. In 1957, a museum to house the Phillips’ collection of Old West paintings, American Indian artifacts and cowboy art was erected. It houses examples of the work of artists such as Frederic Remington.