Cody’s 2 Mules Chuckwagon Explodes In Popularity Thanks To Guy Fieri

It’s not just a tourist attraction. Cody’s 2 Mules Chuckwagon is real working, living, breathing history that you can literally taste.

And it’s become a lot more popular ever since appearing on Food Network host and restaurateur Guy Fieri’s “Guy’s All-American Road Trip.”

The superstar celebrity chef visited the chuckwagon last summer and the episode featuring 2 Mules and other Wyoming spots aired in June.

“After the show aired, within an hour or two we had a phone call from someone wanting to make reservations,” Deb Herman told Cowboy State Daily.

She’s one-half of the dynamic duo that owns 2 Mules Chuckwagon. Rich Herman, her husband, is the other half.

“When I asked how they heard about us, it was Guy Fieri’s show,” she said.

That answer is becoming a lot more common now, and so is something else new to the couple. People they don’t even know are recognizing them out on the street wherever they go.

That happened a lot during the recent Cheyenne Frontier Days Chuckwagon Cookoff, where 2 Mules was the only wagon representing Wyoming — and where it won for chicken-fried steaks and placed second overall in a by-invitation-only contest that attracts some of the nation’s best chuckwagon cooks.

“The first night of the concert at Cheyenne Frontier Days — afterward, I’m sitting here and it’s dark, you know it’s 10:30 at night, and people are just walking by,” Rich Herman told Cowboy State Daily. “And this couple stops, and we’re sitting back in the dark, and the guy yells, he goes, ‘Weren’t you the guys who were on Guy Fieri’s show?’”

It’s All About Western History

No one has asked for their autographs yet, the Hermans said. But it’s nice being recognized for something they feel strongly about.

The couple doesn’t just want to cook delicious meals as a way to supplement their retirement. They want to keep Western history and culture a living, breathing thing.

“We’re not just somebody who bought a chuckwagon and wants to work,” Rich said. “We’re the real thing. We’re not just a tourist attraction.”

To that end, they serve a delicious dinner four nights a week in Cody at the Buffalo Bill Center of the West with their authentic, 1902 Peter Schuttler chuckwagon, which came from Texas. It has been outfitted with all manner of period-authentic gear, and it even came with an old tintype photo of who they believe is of one of the wagon’s earliest cooks.

Sharing real Western history in a way that’s both memorable and delicious is their jam.

“If we don’t continue with the Western history and the Western values, we’re going to lose all this,” Deb said. “This history is going to be lost and, along with it, people’s education of the sacrifices and how hard life was back in the day will be lost.”

Some of that loss is already happening in an American society that is notorious for a short attention span.

“We’ve had people walk by here and say, ‘Those were like the wagons that people came over in on the Oregon Trail,’” Deb said. “And it’s like, ‘No, they weren’t.’”

Chuckwagons actually came along after the Oregon Trail. They were part of the big cattle drives from Texas that started around 1865, bringing beef to the mass American market.

Game-Changer Of An Era

Chuckwagons were the game changers of the era. The 1866 invention, often credited to Texas cattleman Charles Goodnight, helped sustain cowboys for months at a time as they journeyed from Texas north to states as far away as Wyoming.

Before chuckwagons, cowboys could only take much shorter cattle drives. They were limited by whatever food they could carry in their saddle bags — usually some dried meat, salt and biscuits.

Goodnight solved this problem by taking a surplus Army wagon and transforming it into a mobile kitchen for the prairie, one that could carry enough food to last months at a time.

He bolted a big wooden box on the back of an old Studebaker Army wagon that had all kinds of compartments and shelves for food, smaller pots, utensils and washtubs — everything a mobile kitchen needed to function out on the range.

A hinged door kept everything in place while the chuckwagon was moving. Once the chuckwagon stopped, that hinged door could swing down and become a handy worktable.

Heavy items — large pots, cast-iron skillets, Dutch ovens and the like — were stashed in a box mounted beneath the pantry, often called a boot. There was also a cowhide slung beneath the wagon to carry wood and cow chips for starting cook fires.

Chuckwagons didn’t just carry kitchen equipment and food staples, though. They also carried other things that a cattle drive needed. Bedrolls, old-fashioned coffee grinders, barber tools, saw blades to cut wood and a different set of saw blades for butchering any animals that the drive might happen upon during the drive.

The latter, however, would have been much more scarce than history books let on, Herman told Cowboy State Daily. Game isn’t going to stick around with the noise of a cattle drive, and a smart cowboy isn’t going to be shooting at wild animals during a cattle drive either. It would start a stampede.

Cattle wouldn’t have been killed along the way for dinner, either. That would eat into the profits of the ranch.

The only exception to that were calves born along the way. They couldn’t keep up with the drive, so they would usually be slaughtered immediately upon birth.

“Then there would be what they called ‘Son of a Bitch stew,’” Herman said.

Thanks to Goodnight’s invention, Texas cowboys and vaqueros herded about 5 million cattle northward between 1865 to the mid-1890s. It’s a stunning feat that was only possible thanks to chuckwagons.

Guy Has A Thing For Chuckwagons

Cooking for the “Mayor of Flavortown” in Fieri was a really neat experience, the Hermans told Cowboy State Daily.

Not least because it turned out that their chuckwagon was already on Fieri’s radar.

“We were humbled by that,” Deb told Cowboy State Daily. “A lot of businesses, I’ve heard, have to apply to be on his show and they have to submit recipes and an application.”

One of the things Deb particularly liked about Fieri’s Wyoming stops is how it’s been putting Cowboy State businesses and places on the map.

“He’s done a lot for those businesses and for ours,” she said.

After the filming was all done and the dinner was over, Rich had a quiet moment to ask Fieri a burning question.

“I just said, ‘So tell me honestly, what can I do better?’” Rich said. “And he said, ‘Not a thing.’ He said, ‘The steaks, the beans, the biscuits — everything was amazing.’ He was a little more colorful than that, but he loved it.”

Then Fieri asked for Rich’s phone and took a selfie of the two of them together before handing the phone back.

“I didn’t ask for it, he just did it,” Rich said. “And then Deb was standing right there and said, ‘Hey, what about me?’ And he said, ‘Come here, sweetheart,’ and put his arm around her and took a picture of the three of us. He was just a very down-to-earth plain-folks guy.”

Fieri does have a soft spot for chuckwagons, Deb told Cowboy State Daily. His grandfather had one when Fieri was growing up.

“They did a lot of Dutch oven cooking when he was growing up, so he’s very interested in that,” she said. “And so it kind of brought him back to some of the things he remembered from his childhood.”

At first, Fieri wanted to buy the Hermans’ 1902 wagon that came from Texas. It has quite a long history going back to some of the oldest and largest ranches in Texas, and with that tintype photo of one of the original cooks, it is one of a kind.

The Hermans didn’t want to sell their wagon, so Rich exchanged phone numbers instead with Fieri’s son Hunter to help them search for a chuckwagon.

It might come from Wyoming, Rich said, but more likely it will be from Texas, too.

“That’s where I’m seeing the most chuckwagons right now,” Rich said.

Regardless, though, it was the perfect ending for the couple that wants to keep the history of chuckwagons alive to know that their historical chuckwagon hobby is helping someone as well-known as Guy Fieri carry on a good, old-fashioned Western tradition.

Contact Renee Jean at renee@cowboystatedaily.com

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