Chuckwagon exhibition comes to Adams County

OTHELLO - Back in the day, the day being about 1886 or 1902 or so, the most important wagon in a cattle drive was the chuckwagon. Even though the old-fashioned cattle drive is long gone, chuckwagons still have their champions, and a group of them exhibited their wagons and their cooking skills at the Adams County Fair Friday and Saturday.

Normally competition is part of a chuckwagon gathering, but 2012 is the first year the wagons have made a stop in Othello. Exhibitors plan to come back next year and add competitions, said John Sullivan, of Maple Valley, who displayed the wagon he rebuilt from pieces he found in the Southwest.

If the chuckwagon was the most important vehicle in the string, the cook was one of the most important people. "The chuckwagon cook was everything," said Ned Larson, of Stevensville, Mont. Their chuckwagon also started out in pieces, which they rebuilt with the help of friends.

The chuckwagon cook had the medicine chest, served as the cowboy confidante, held everybody's money and was the go-to guy when one of the horses got sick. "And you never wanted to make the cook mad," Teri Larson, Ned's wife, said. The chuckwagon circuit (and there is one) pays tribute to Cookie by insisting on as much authenticity as possible.

Competitors must use their campfires, cast-iron frying pans and Dutch ovens to cook meat, bread, beans, potatoes and a dessert. It's not part of the competition, but most cooks also brew up a pot of coffee, Sullivan said. Cowboy coffee is made when grounds are thrown in the bottom of the pot and the water is then boiled over a campfire. It's stout stuff. "You could float a horseshoe in it," Ned Larson said.

Competition organizers usually provide the ingredients, Ned Larson said. After that, it's up to the cooks. "For instance, everybody got apples, but what they do with them is up to them," Larson said.

"A lot of stuff we can't use," said Bob Ottmar, of Moses Lake. Cheese being one example because it would have spoiled on the trail.

All equipment must have been available to Cookie during cattle drive era, roughly 1860 to 1920, Sullivan said. "There are different things you have to have on the wagon," Sullivan said, roughly 100 items total. "Alarm clock, believe it or not, is one of them." Modern reproductions of utensils are okay, but they've got to look and work like the 1880s or 1910s versions.

OK, so the microwave in the motor home, the gas barbecue grill and the propane camp stove are out. What to do? Why, that's what the campfire and its coals are for.

Campfires don't exactly come with thermometers and timers. "You've got to really watch," Ottmar said. One way to use a Dutch oven is to set it in a bed of coals and shovel more coals on the lid, but Dan McCaffree, of Roundup, Mont., set his Dutch oven on a hook over the coals, the better to control baking on his pan of biscuits. He's got a lot of experience. "I've been Dutch oven cooking about 50 years,' he said. "Started out in sheep camp."

"There's a rule of thumb that everybody goes by, but after you cook a while you just throw that out the window," Ottmar said. McCaffree kept a close eye on that pan of biscuits, checking them after about 20 minutes, to ensure they didn't burn on the bottom.

So is it fun, cooking over a campfire? "I haven't decided yet," McCaffree said.

He's been cooking this way for decades, but other exhibitors came in through an interest in the Old West - or, in the case of Ned and Teri Larson, by helping friends with their daughter's wedding.

They lived in southern California at the time, and the bride and groom had a "very Western" wedding, with the Larsons lending their expertise with outdoor cooking. "You know how receptions go, one beer leads to another," Ned Larson said, and as the night went on it just seemed like a fine idea to put together a chuckwagon.

John Sullivan is president of the Northwest chapter of the American Chuckwagon Association, and first saw chuckwagon competitions in his winter home in Arizona. "It's huge in the Southwest," he said. He got Bob Ottmar and his friend Les Myers, of Chewelah, involved. "He talked about chuckwagons and cooking on them all the time, and that's how I got started," Myers said.

"We were green," Teri Larson said of their first competition. The wagons and their equipment are a competition all their own. "The wagon, you learn as you go," said Dan's wife Carol McCaffree. "This is the boss," Dan said.

The Larsons thought they were well-prepared. "We thought we knew it all, because we'd studied, you know," Teri Larson said.

"We read books," Ned Larson said. Unfortunately the book learning didn't have all the tricks. "It was fun. A learning curve," Ned said.

"And we're still not there," Teri said.