Rusty's Trailblazin' Chuckwagon Dispells Cowboy Myths

Rusty's Trailblazin' Chuckwagon rolls into town with stories of the cowboys on the trails, pushing longhorn cattle from Texas to the railheads that led to the Chicago stockyards. It's an authentic and entertaining sampling of the Old West.

The Marion, Illinois-based chuckwagon is a regular at the DuQuoin (IL) State Fair, not far from Marion, IL, Rusty's current home.  (Regrettably, this year, the Western World area is being replaced by a wild-animal-themed lay-out so, Rusty won't be there.) 

From Marion, the chuckwagon crosses the country, setting up for state fairs, stock shows, at Dollywood, and at various other activities, even school events, sharing the stories, lore, music, and a sampling of the food of the cattle trail. That era which Rusty's Chuckwagon represents stretched from about the end of the Civil War in 1865 when ex-slaves and ex-Confederates were looking for work and about 1890.

Check out the Rusty's Trailblazin' Chuckwagon website for some photos and details about booking him.

THE CHUCKWAGON

Texas transplant Rusty Rankin bases his show around his 1901 John Deere horse-drawn chuckwagon. The chuckwagon is completely restored and refitted using authentic, turn of the century materials and an accurate representation of the wagons used by many ranches back in the 1860's. Helping him out are people like Riverboat John Ferguson who won his name by riding all the riverboats he's ever encounrtered, performing on many, from the Mississippi Queen to the Julia Belle Swann.

When on-site, Rusty usually has some campfire coffee and pinto beans at hand along with cowboy cornbread for sampling as he tells his stories. Being a cowboy is like being a sailor, he said. "Join the cowboys and see the world. Fifteen hundred miles up and fifteen hundred miles back," he said.

CATTLE HERD COOK

He describes to rapt audiences how the cook kept the cowboys fed and how it functioned as farrier, country store, doctor's office, carpenter's shop, and transport for the cowboy's bedrolls. He served as barber and dentist on the trail.

The trail cook was so valuable that he earned as much as a dollar a day compared to the common drover's fifty cents a day. He was the real boss, said Rusty. "If you had a good cook, the boy's work for you, if you didn't have a good cook, they'd leave and go someplace else." The trail cook was a down-and-dirty-cook. He could get you a meal fixed any time of day or not, in any conditions.

FOOD

Cowboys ate two meals a day, one before dawn, one after dark, both the same. "They had bacon because it's smoked and cured and we don't have to worrry about it spoiling," said Rankin. "So they fry it up. Once you've got that, you got grease so now you can make gravy with water, it's what you call windmill gravy. You'd have some pinto beans, you know, those Mexican strawberries. Then you would have some rice with that gravy, and then good old cowboy coffee. Then you'd have biscuits or cornbread."

Cowboys went through a lot of coffee. The usual procedure was to toss a couple handsful of coffee into a pot of water and boil it. Cowboys didn't know about the attraction of negative and positive ions, said Rankin, but they did know a horseshoe in the pot settled the grounds so the coffee could be poured. Grounds left behind in the cups were gathered, tossed in a bag to be dried and reused. Grounds remaining in the pot stayed there.

Rankin's chuckwagon would've carried 3,500-pounds of cargo, including 140 lbs. of pork bacon, 100 lbs flour, 100 lbs. rice, and 400-500 lbs. coffee. "It was a pretty heavy load. That's why they had to have four horses to pull," Rankin said. They'd get only a couple chances to resupply along the trail.

Water supplies were important. But Texas river water was muddy. To settle the mud, an arm of prickly pear cactus would be chopped off, slits cut into two or three leaves which were placed in the water barrel and they would soak up the mud. "I've done it myself," said Rankin.

TRUE COWBOY MUSIC

Besides stories, Jared, Rusty, and Riverboat John share some of the music of the trail. "But we're not country-western singers, " said Rusty, "we don't sing about pickup trucks, momma, and your dog." Instead, the trio concentrate on the authentic tunes cowboys sang.

Cowboys usually took an existing popular tune, often a soft hymn, Brock said, and added their own sagebrush lyrics. They sang it around the campfire, but as often as not, at night while tending the herd, the soft music helping to keep the skittish longhorns calm.

And although they may strum guitars on occasion, that wasn't a campfire instrument, Gene Autry and Roy Rogers notwithstanding. The guitar couldn't stand up to rough handling on the trail, said Brock. Instead, cowboys would pull out a more sturdily constructed banjo.

NORTH FROM TEXAS TO ILLINOIS...AND OUT FROM THERE

Rankin left Texas for his current headquarters in Marion, Illinois. From this central location, Rusty's Trailblazin' Chuckwagon makes appearances across the United States, including Texas.