Visiting the Pioneers

You enter into the main museum, which is pretty interesting. There are a lot of mounted animals and guns, too many for my taste. but there are a lot of old furniture from pioneer homes that are too fragile to put into the actual village houses, as well as a huge amount of Native American artifacts. The interesting part for me is the actual village. As far as historical villages go, it's pretty standard, but it's reconstructed to look like an actual town that people could live in. Instead of just facades, you can go into the houses and buildings and really look around. There are a number of houses, as well as a sheriffs office, a general store, and a telephone museum; all with even more stuff to see inside.

Inside, the houses are laid out like typical houses of the time. The general store has two stories the bottom story is typical general store crammed full of bottles and knick-knacks,and the upstairs has the dentist's office. There is the old printing press and linotype machine from Hunter North Dakota's newspaper The Hunter Times, which was operational until the 1940s. Other buildings include a replica sod house, a tractor museum, a law-enforcement museum, a church, a bank, and an old barber shop transported to Bonanzaville from Buffalo North Dakota.

Certain days in the summer, they also have kids from the Trollwood performing arts school hanging around pretending to be from pioneer days. For the most part, it's pretty fun to mess around with them and they have a good sense of humor about it. There were a couple kids who were taking the whole thing a little too seriously, and that was irritating, but it's all in good fun.