Watson Lake

For a town its size, a truly impressive amount of cultural activity goes on in Prescott, a large part taking place in its many top-notch museums. Within walking distance of Courthouse Plaza, the Sharlott Hall Museum is a collection of buildings and gardens, the oldest built around 1867, which house a variety of artifacts, archives and other collections reflecting territorial life in Arizona. The celebrated permanent collection at the Phippen Museum contains more than a century's worth of Western and Native American sculpture, painting,  photography and crafts, while the Smoki museum focuses exclusively on the artifacts and art, contemporary and ancient, of Arizona's Native American people.

The year is also packed with festivals, fairs and events in Prescott, from a lively Oktoberfest to the Annual Arizona Cowboy Poets Gathering, but if there's one event that captures Prescott's love of its Western heritage, it's got to be Prescott Frontier Days and the World's Oldest Rodeo, which happen annually around the 4th of July. The rodeo was established in 1888 as an informal "cowboy contest" with cash prizes and went on to give birth to the full-blown rodeos we know and love today. Even though modern rodeo is big business, this one transports you to a simpler time and place, where the heart of the event came from the community that supported it. Little kids fiddle with toy lariats and eat corn-on-the-cob while sparkly rodeo queens show off their horsemanship and tough young men pit themselves against half a ton of irritable horseflesh. Follow it up with some fireworks and you might get a little misty-eyed and nostalgic for an America you may never have even met before.

Article by Sarah Horton.