Off-Campus Activity Blog

For my off-campus activity, I chose to attend the Up the Chisholm Trail Cattle Drive & Chuckwagon Cook-off, presented by the Williamson Museum. It was held on Friday the 17th and Saturday the 18th of September at San Gabriel Park here in Georgetown. I attended on Saturday, mostly because my friend Kelly was using my camera to take pictures and asked me if I was free to attend with her. I'm glad I did, as it allowed me to take a step back in Texas history and my own history.

The Chisholm Trail is the cattle driving trail that led from ranches in Texas to railways in Kansas, where the cattle were distributed to buyers. Interestingly enough, the town where I graduated high school, Ozona, Texas, is also located on one of the main feeder trails to the Chisholm trail. At the event, they hold a miniature version of the cattle drives that occurred during the trail's heyday. They also, as the title of the event would indicate, hold a chuckwagon cookoff that requires that participants be dressed in period costumes, attire that would have generally been found on the ranch-hands that drove the cattle north along the trail.

I mentioned earlier that going to the event was a step back in time in my personal history as well. I grew up outside Lubbock, Texas, for 12 years of my life and have been many a time to Texas Tech University's National Ranching Heritage Center, where there are chuckwagon cooks who demonstrate the cooking typical to the ranch lifestyle. There is also a museum that shows important dates in the history of ranching in the United States.

I went many times to the Center because my family on my mother's side were farmers for many years. Now, the family farm is a state-designated wildlife habitat. My mom has a few of the old farm "relics," like barbed wire and picture frames made from the the barn doors. It's interesting to me how quickly the world has progressed in terms of technology and output potential. If my family hadn't moved away from the farm due to the effects of the Dust Bowl, they would probably have delved further into debt trying to maintain a lifestyle when big corporations could produce the same crop at a fraction of the cost. That, however, is a thought best left to discuss another day.

Though I am only now getting around to writing this blog, I am sitting here wondering why I left it until the last minute as I always do. I didn't have much stress about school during September and I now have more than I feel I can handle. The life of rancher, riding a horse up a dusty trail sounds appealing in contrast to all this hard work I'm doing in pursuit of my degree. Then I remember that I would be sleeping outside on the ground and not showering for days on end and snap back to reality.

Brady