Gold Rush Days

Gold Rush Days opens on Frontier Street. The 78th edition runs February 11–14, 2027. The Wickenburg Chamber of Commerce sets the opening ceremony for 10 a.m. Friday, February 12, in front of its visitor center at 216 N. Frontier Street, where festival officials and the stuntman Will Roberts start the weekend. Classic cars line the same street that morning from 9 to noon, the only day they are shown. The show takes the first 75 cars to sign up and arrive. The 2027 theme is “Golden Roots & Cowboy Boots.”

By then the carnival has been running for a day. Brown’s Amusements opens its rides Thursday at 4 p.m. That first day is Buddy Day, when a second wristband goes for half price. The rides run from 10 a.m. to 11 p.m. Friday and Saturday and until 5 p.m. Sunday. The parade comes through Saturday at 10 a.m. It has more than 75 entries of local businesses, marching bands and dozens of horses, and the chamber calls it the third-largest parade in Arizona. Performances at the Del E. Webb Center fill out the weekend. There will be no free stage in 2027. The chamber cites limited space and a renovation at the Wickenburg Community Center, and expects to bring the stage back in 2028. The Library of Congress lists the festival among America’s Local Legacies.

The Senior Pro Rodeo on Constellation Road

The rodeo is held outdoors at the Everett Bowman Rodeo Arena, 935 Constellation Road, less than two miles from downtown.

• Thursday, 8 a.m.: All-women’s breakaway roping, billed as Roping for Gold, a $10,000 breakaway jackpot.
• Friday, 11 a.m.: Slack, the round for overflow contestants who do not fit into the main performances. Admission is free that day.
• Saturday and Sunday, 2 p.m.: The NSPRA performances.

Seating is general admission and covered grandstand space is limited, so people bring lawn chairs. Shuttles run from the free parking to the gate. The rodeo goes on rain or shine.

Pans, shovels and a hundred artists

Gold panning runs through the weekend in partnership with the 1899 Historic Hotel, from 11 a.m. Friday through Sunday afternoon. The Gold Panning Championship is set for 1 p.m. Sunday, February 14, 2027. The other old mining event is the mucking and drilling contest, and the chamber says changes are coming to it. A Library of Congress page explains the terms: drilling and mucking is how gold is taken from the ground, and a hand mucker is a man who shovels ore and unwanted rock out of a mine.

Around Stone Park and the Wickenburg Public Library at 164 E. Apache Street, the Wickenburg Art Club stages the Artisans’ Fair. More than a hundred local and visiting artists show work in various mediums, and the club’s Library Fine Arts Show and Sale runs alongside.

The club’s tie to the festival goes back to 1961, when Chuck Brown was asked to chair an art show in the parking lot of what is now Ben’s Saddlery on Tegner Street. In 1964 the Gold Rush Art Show hung 100 paintings on the American Legion lawn. In 1968 the club president, Earl Huff, got permission from Dorothy Coons of the Town of Wickenburg to hold the Artisans Fair on the library grounds. Huff was an acrylics painter, and his wife, Betty, made baskets. Jeanine Brown, the club’s historian, writes that the fair has been the club’s main source of funds ever since. In 2001 the club bought a former church at 188 South Tegner Street for its Art Center, and income from the fair helps keep its dues low.

The Round-up Club’s celebration

The festival honors Henry Wickenburg’s 1863 discovery of gold along the Hassayampa River, which set off a rush and led to the founding of the town. The accounts of him differ. In 1964 Arizona Highways called him a mineralogist immigrant from Germany. His prospector acquaintances laughed at his ore and called it “fool’s gold.” He traced it to its source and named his claim the Vulture, for the big bird that eyed him from a nearby perch. In 1988 the same magazine called him an Austrian immigrant and repeated the legend that he found the strike when he picked up an ore-laden rock to throw at a recalcitrant burro. “True story or not,” it added, “the gold was real enough.”

The festival’s own start is dated two ways. The chamber, the Library of Congress and Arizona Highways in 1988 give 1948. Arizona Highways in February 1964 wrote that members of the Round-up Club originated Gold Rush Days in 1951. The Round-up Club was then Wickenburg’s chamber of commerce, and it used ranch titles. Its president was the Boss, its vice president the Straw Boss, its publicity director the Wrangler, and its board members were Top Hands. The Boss that year was Dana Burden, co-owner of Remuda Guest Ranch. One of the club’s fourteen standing committees was the Keep Wickenburg Western Committee. Brad Blossom, general chairman of Gold Rush Days, told the magazine, “Wickenburg is the last small western town that hasn’t been spoiled today by civilization.”

In those years the festival was a three-day celebration held early in February. The 1963 observance was a highlight of the town’s centennial and drew more than 12,000 “pie-pan prospectors.” Its events included gold panning, a whiskerodeo, a pony express race, a stage revue, a buckaroo roundup and a gala ball. Burden grew up on Remuda Ranch, and according to his 2006 obituary he went on to chair Gold Rush Days, the Gold Shirt Gang and the Gold Rush Rodeo.

Gold in the dry riverbed

By 1988 Arizona Highways described a two-day celebration on the second weekend in February. That year it drew 30,000 people, and the magazine credited it with bolstering the town’s economy through the 1950s and ‘60s. The chamber of commerce placed $2,000 in gold in troughs in the dry bed of the Hassayampa, and waves of visitors tried panning for it. Bearded locals with big hats and big guns, and painted women in garters and lace, mingled with the crowds of modern-day prospectors.