This 2,000-square-foot, site-specific mural covers all four walls of the courtroom of the historic McKinley County Courthouse. Lloyd Moylan painted it in 1940, the year after the building opened to the public. Utilizing the architecture of the room to organize his narrative, he tells a version of Southwestern United States history, from the pre-human period to the turn of the 20th century. The mural begins in the northwest corner with images of prehistoric animals such as dinosaurs. The west wall covers the beginning of human history through the pre-contact period. With the next turn of a corner, Moylan introduces Spanish and then American colonization and the “Indian reservation” era. The east wall is dedicated to Western American expansion and settlement, and the final corner memorializes the major historical turning point of the transcontinental railroad.
