Founders' Day

At seven o’clock on the Friday and Saturday evenings of Memorial Day weekend, the Tonasket Comancheros start their professional rodeo at the Tonasket Rodeo Grounds on Rodeo Road. The program, sanctioned by the PRCA, includes bull riding, saddle bronc riding, bareback riding, barrel racing, team roping, breakaway roping and steer wrestling, with stock from the contractor BAR C5. In the middle of each night’s performance comes the chicken race, which the Okanogan County Tourism Council’s listing calls “world famous.” The club’s listing names who will run the microphone and the sound: “Rodeo Announcer Al Parsons and his lovely Sound Chick Joanie will be guiding us through this fun weekend with tons of informative conversation!”

American Legion Post 82 sponsors the beer garden. Concessions are run in partnership with the Samaritan Riders of Okanogan Master Charter. For the 2026 rodeo, held May 22 and 23, the tourism council promised a new food court. The club’s ticket page lists the 2027 rodeo for May 28 and 29.

Saturday on Whitcomb Avenue

The parade falls between the two rodeo nights. The 2026 listing set it for 11 a.m. on Saturday, May 23, and called it the “Diamonds in the Rough” parade. Its street is Whitcomb Avenue. A Chronicle photograph from 2019 shows members of American Legion Post No. 82 making their way along it.

The program around the parade has varied from year to year. For the 86th annual celebration, May 27 and 28, 2022, Okanogan Living listed these events:

Friday evening: a street dance on Third Street with music by the Night Riders. Saturday, 7 a.m.: a fun run in Chief Tonasket Park. Saturday, 10:30 a.m.: the parade. Saturday: classic cars at the North Country Cruise-In and street vendors in town through the day.

Effie Lea Wilson was honored as grand marshal that year.

The Beyerses and Grant’s Market

The grand marshals come from the town’s own. In 2002 the parade honored Ralph and Leona Beyers. About 1971 they went into business with TV repair and sales, then added auto licensing and later a gift shop. Her 2010 obituary says that after 39 years in business they “were known by almost everyone in town.” On holidays, it adds, her pies could often be found at the local food bank dinners.

Grant Leavell, owner of Grant’s Market, was selected as the 2020 grand marshal and died April 15 of that year. Before his death Marylou Kriner of the Tonasket Chamber of Commerce delivered him a plaque. It read: “Grant has been active in many charitable organizations as well as being a key player in both the agricultural and retail communities. His dedication, warm personality and generosity will be remembered far into the future.”

The 2021 parade was set for Saturday, June 5. It named Grant’s Market as grand marshal and honored his late wife, Sandra, and the store’s employees. The Tonasket High School class of 2021 held its own senior parade at 10:30 that morning, half an hour before the Founders’ Day parade.

The chamber running the parade was struggling at the time. At its May 11, 2021 meeting, the first since the pandemic began, Kriner was serving as interim president. She reported that membership had fallen from 70 paying members to 26. “If we do not get the people, the chamber will fold,” she said.

A festival in place of a parade

According to a March 2025 Chronicle report, the chamber had handed parade duties to the Tonasket Farmers Market the year before. By then the Perfect Passage project, a revitalization of Whitcomb Avenue and Highway 97, was detouring traffic onto Western Avenue through at least July 10. At the March 11, 2025 city council meeting, Mike Torrence of the Farmers Market announced that the 89th annual celebration, set for May 24, would go without a parade. “We’re not going to have a parade this year,” he said. “We decided that we’re not going to have a parade; we’re going to have the ‘Founders’ Day Festival.’”

Torrence said organizers had talked about holding the parade at Chief Tonasket Park, at the high school, or on a reroute through town. “If we move away from the downtown area, we become disloyal to the downtown retail area,” he told the council. Instead, part of the downtown corridor would be cordoned off for:

live music and family contests a costume contest with prizes * vendors, whose goods he pictured running from arts and crafts to corn on the cob and kettle corn

The rodeo queen and visiting royalty would still be honored, and the American Legion would present the colors at an opening ceremony.

Councilman Jeff McMillan asked whether the parade would return the following year. “My initial thought is to do both,” Torrence answered. Councilwoman Christa “Teagan” Levine suggested he find a way to include the high school’s students and graduating seniors. By 2026 a parade was back on the tourism council’s calendar.

The Comancheros’ grounds since the 1940s

The rodeo is older than most of the celebration around it. HistoryLink’s essay on rodeo in Washington lists the Tonasket Rodeo, with the year 1937, among the new rodeos of the Depression years. The essay says rodeo was then, for many, affordable entertainment, and that these new rodeos thrived for decades. The Comancheros write that “from the early 1940’s to the present, the Tonasket Comancheros have been working to improve the Rodeo Grounds to make a welcoming place where the entire community can come together.” The club has shared a photograph from 1949 as a piece of Tonasket rodeo history. It shows Deb Copenhaver, later a two-time world champion saddle bronc rider, competing there as a young rider aboard White Hope.

The grounds stay in use after Memorial Day. In 2026 the club hosted:

barrel racing in July the demolition derby on September 26, which the club calls a longtime September tradition; John Swartsel, driving No. 53, was the overall winner

In August its queen, Natalie Brownlee, represented the Comancheros at the Omak Stampede. In late July, with families evacuated because of fires, the club posted: “You are welcome to bring your animals to the Tonasket Rodeo Grounds. You can enter through the south gate to the arena and pen areas.”