Around Wyoming: Lusk’s Legend Of Rawhide An Immersive Wild West Experience

LUSK — They set the hills ablaze around Lusk, Wyoming, the second weekend of every July.

But don’t bother calling the fire department.

Local firefighters are already on the scene. In fact, members of the fire department probably even volunteered to help set the hillside ablaze.

Fire gets used quite often during the historical pageant known as the Legend of Rawhide, which Lusk has been presenting off and on since 1946.

The first fires are tiny little campfires set around the arena in bare dirt, as part of the play’s Indian village and pioneer wagon train sets.

Later, though, the fire is used to burn up a wagon, and then, in its most dramatic use, it’s used to spell out the words “Legend of Rawhide.” The fiery orange letters flicker in the uncaring prairie wind against a dark and distant hillside behind the arena.

Those fires are all part of a live-action Western re-enactment of a bloodcurdling oral history that, some say, includes the origin of how the Rawhide Buttes were named.

While there are less-harrowing tales of how the buttes were named, Lusk chose to highlight the most dramatic, and it’s quite the draw. Between 400 to 600 spectators will show up any given night of the Legend of Rawhide.

In it, a reckless young man named Clyde is part of a wagon train headed to California for the gold rush that begin in 1848.

The scene begins movie style, with dozens of people gathering in an Indian village concocted from four large teepees.

Boys in buckskins wearing wigs of black, braided hair, whose skin has been painted reddish brown with ochre, wrestle in the dirt and sit in circles, throwing dirt at each other.

Women in the village, similarly attired, gather around teepees, preparing dinner or just socializing, while young girls play games with each other.

It is an idyllic scene, but not for long.

Around the bend of the hill, hidden from view, a wagon train suddenly appears.

It is a group of pioneers headed to California on the Oregon Trail, as part of the Gold Rush.

By The Hundreds of Thousands

This particular wagon train had only half a dozen or so wagons — a small fraction of the settlers who would eventually travel the Oregon Trail.

Pioneers came not by the hundreds or even thousands, a narrator explains. They came by the hundreds of thousands.

Historians estimate between 300,000 to 500,000 people traveled west on the Oregon Trail.

Most of the time, their passage was peaceful. But anything can happen out on the prairie, where help is far, far away, and this particular wagon train is hyper-aware that they are deep within potentially hostile territory.

Their fervent hope is that if they bother no one while they are here, they themselves will, in turn, not be bothered.

But, when the late-night campfire talk inevitably turns to their biggest fear — the potentially hostile natives of North America -- Clyde, hoping to impress a girl named Kate, vows he will kill the first “Indian” he sees.

His colleagues all try to dissuade him, pointing out that nothing good could come from it, particularly given their situation right now, so isolated and so far from home.

Darkness Falls

Clyde, however, is miffed at being left out of the next day’s scouting party, so he decides to do a little scouting of his own.

A young Indian maid comes walking across the arena, a bouquet of sunflowers in hand.

She walks slowly as a spotlight follows her steps.

Then, a single shot rings out. She falls to the ground, dead.

There is silence for a long time. The spotlight doesn’t move from her body, amplifying the horror of the moment.

A group of Indian women finally come, wailing and crying, to carry her body away.

The spotlight is cut, and darkness falls on the arena.

This Means War

The next morning, Clyde’s absence from his post is noticed.

While the wagon master is grilling Clyde about that, an arrow is shot down into the dirt in their midst, and the beat of drums is heard in the distance.

George, a scout who claims to have experience dealing with the natives, tries to say it couldn’t be war drums, but, before too long, an Indian brave comes riding into the wagon train, gesturing angrily, a spear in hand.

He doesn’t speak English — or any European language for that matter — so the conversation is conducted through sign language with George.

George eventually determines that the wagon train stands accused of the murder of an Indian princess, shot while she was gathering flowers. The tribe is demanding whoever fired the fatal shot be turned over to them.

Some members of the wagon train, including the wagon master, immediately suspect Clyde, but when they find out the likely punishment is being flayed alive, they refuse to give him up.

The Indian brave throws down his spear and rides off with war cries, to tell his chief the pioneers want to fight.

Clyde Gives Himself Up

War cries and the sound of hooves beating the dirt at full speed are the next thing spectators of this historical pageant hear in the arena.

It is a dramatic and harrowing moment.

The Indians are riding around and around the wagon train at full speed, and dozens of gunshots are heard. It is a wild moment, one full of desperation. Spectators not only see the desperation of this situation, but feel it with every gunshot.

Clyde realizes everyone is likely to die — including his beloved Kate — if he doesn’t give himself up, so he confesses to his crime. The wagon master won’t hear of giving him up to be flayed alive, but when Clyde sees Kate is in the line with the other women demanding they be given rifles to defend themselves, he realizes he has to do what the wagon master won’t.

He has to give himself up, even while knowing what his fate will be.

The natives stop circling the wagons then, and the light then focuses on Clyde, tied to a tree, where Indians are flaying him alive in front of the pioneers.

The “skin” they remove is actually tape, beneath which is theatrical blood, to render imagery that is as grotesquely similar to a bloody, flayed-alive body as possible.

After Clyde dies, the pioneers take him down from the tree, and they’re allowed to go on their way to California.

The narrator says that they made it to California but could never forget the terrible tragedy they saw unfold at the foot of the Rawhide Buttes.

As the narrator speaks those final words, a fire blooms on the far hillside and the letters, “Legend of Rawhide” appear. They’re allowed to burn until they burn themselves out.

Play Based On Oral Histories

The play based on Bonsell’s research has changed very little since 1946, when the pageant was first performed, for three weeks straight, as part of a homecoming after the end of World War II.

Bonsell wrote the play because she was working on a master’s thesis in drama. Her topic had been suggested by a man named Doc Reckling, a prominent Lusk citizen and physician, who wanted something grand to welcome Lusk’s soldiers home.

Bonsell would base her play on oral histories long handed down in Lusk. Among these oral historians was then Mayor George Earl Peet.

“We have no actual knowledge that the Legend is true,” a 1986 commemorative program says about Bonsell’s play. “There are many versions of this story. Many folks who are relatives of the men who were present at the time of the skinning have sworn to this or that version of the happenings. Their stories are conflicting.”

Bonsell studied all of the various stories, as well as further statements from those claiming to know how the Buttes were named, before writing her play, a script that’s still largely in use today.

Crew Of Hundreds

The play takes a ginormous cast and crew of almost 200 people, all of whom are long-standing volunteers.

In fact, many of the volunteers are playing roles that were handed down to them from previous family members, along with costumes and props.

Eighteen-year-old Hattie Nelson, for example, has been involved in Legend of Rawhide for as long as she can recall.

She started out as a little pioneer girl riding in a wagon with the other younger children, and the first memory she has of the pageant is singing “Jesus Loves Me” in the prayer scene. Afterward, she and the other children implore God to keep them safe and not let any Indians “get” them.

Later, as Nelson grew up, she walked alongside the wagon instead of riding, and helped the older ladies serve food during the chuckwagon scene.

This time around, however, she played one of the major roles of the pageant. She was Kate, Clyde’s love interest.

It’s a role many of her Aunts have played before her.

“I have a lot of pride in being asked to play this role,” she told Cowboy State Daily. “I know how much Rawhide has lifted our town.”

Twila Barnett, meanwhile, told Cowboy State Daily she’s the fourth generation to be involved in the show.

She works behind the scenes in an administrative role. Her son, Taylor Barnett plays Jim Farley, the Wagon Boss, while her husband plays an outrider for the “soiled doves” wagon. “Soiled doves” is a euphemism applied to prostitutes in that time frame.

Whenever someone decides to retire from the show, they let the organizers of the program know the year before, so that someone can shadow their roles for the next year.

The show is not without risk for the participants. Nelson remembers falling out of a wagon when she was a young girl. Her hair became trapped under a wagon wheel and had to be cut so that she could be safely removed.

“I had a kind of messy haircut after that,” she said, smiling.

She also recalls a friend, who was playing an Indian brave, fall off his horse and get trampled, leaving a huge horses’ hoof indented on his forehead.

Something happens almost every year, Collins said.

For that reason, there’s an ambulance on standby, as well as the fire department, just in case.

No Heroes, No Villains

The townsfolk Cowboy State Daily talked to agreed that the Legend of Rawhide depicts a terrible and tragic tale for all sides, one that really has no real heroes or villains.

The pageant is history, warts and all, even if every detail of the play might not be verifiable, historical fact.

“Some things are probably true, and some are probably fictionalized,” Barnette told Cowboy State Daily. “But once you watch the show, you’ll be able to see how it could happen.”

The culture clash itself is a “signature of Wyoming history,” Collins said.

“Maybe everything didn’t happen exactly like the play,” he addd. “But it’s based on a true story.”

What he likes about the pageant is how it brings the whole community together for a common goal — putting on a fabulous and thought-provoking experience that also helps lift up the town, providing funds for scholarships and for work at the fairgrounds.

That coming together is what brought Nelson back this year to play Kate.

“I brought four girls with me this time,” she added. “They come from across Wyoming. Riverton, Wheatland, and so on. Some of them want to join the Indians and some of them want to join the soiled doves.”

The play foreshadows the terrible culture clash that was to ensue between Europeans and the native inhabitants. That has lessons for a modern world, Collins believes, even if every detail of the Legend of Rawhide is not historically perfect.

“It brings the history back to life,” he said. “It’s a fabulous drama of two totally different cultures and their differences.”

Clyde shooting an innocent Indian princess was “wrong no matter how you portray it,” Collins said.

America today, he added, has its differences — differences that appear to be widening.

“Regardless of our differences, we have to step up and acknowledge when we do something wrong,” Collins said. “When Clyde did that (in the play), that was right. What’s right is right and what’s wrong is wrong. It really puts the enormity of that on trial.”

Renée Jean can be reached at renee@cowboystatedaily.com.