Legend of Rawhide

Each July the arena at the Niobrara County Fairgrounds in Lusk becomes a wagon camp near the Rawhide Buttes, the hills south of town. A 2019 account in Cowboy State Daily described the work: volunteers bring in trees to stand in the arena and build a waterfall. For the 2026 performances, on July 10 and 11, gates opened at 7:00 in the evening, with a pre-show at 7:30 and a flag ceremony at 8:15. The pageant began at 8:30. There are covered wagons, tribal characters on horseback, and narrators. The final act recreates a man being skinned alive.

A wagon camp in the arena

Actors play out the evening routine of a wagon train crossing the plains from Missouri in the 1840s, and nearby other actors portray the life of a village, according to Cowboy State Daily. The pageant’s cast page lists Ross Diercks as director and Taylor Barnette as wagon master. Dan Henry Hanson plays the chief, Sara Krein and Marleigh Smith share the part of the princess, and Colt Travnicek plays the medicine man. Jeff White plays Joshua, the drunk, with Amy Swisher as his wife, and Josh Keller is Lt. John Fremont. Ben Hanson, the board treasurer, plays the messenger who rides between the camps. Other parts are filled by outriders and Wagon Train Kids.

“The entire performance is local,” Hanson told The Fence Post in 2025. “There are no professional actors or outside groups. Everyone involved has a tie to the community.” That article put the volunteers at 300 to 400 a year, for acting, staging, costuming and logistics. In 2019 Jackie Bredthauer, director of the Niobrara Chamber of Commerce, estimated that half of Lusk’s residents worked on the pageant or the events around it. The board’s thanks to its volunteers mentions the horses and other animals, props, and wagons they bring.

Each year the board dedicates the performance to someone who has kept it going. In 2025 the dedication went to the Wurdeman family of Duck Creek Ranch near Node. Neal Wurdeman rode as an outrider for several years. His son Carson was a Wagon Train Kid, then an outrider, then played Tom Hall. Carson’s brother Garrett played both Tom and Hal in past pageants, and the family donated hay.

When the pageant ends, Travis Geile and the Preuit Road Band begin playing. On the Friday of the 2026 run, William Clark Green played from 10:30 to midnight on a separate ticket. Raffles run both nights for a 50/50 pot, a gun, and a belt buckle.

Saturday in Lusk

Saturday starts early at the fairgrounds. Grass volleyball begins at 8:00, a closest-to-the-pin contest runs in the arena through the morning, and pitch and corn hole tournaments follow. The Ranch Feed and Team Driving Contest fills the afternoon. At 4:00 the parade lines up at the fairgrounds, passes the hospital, and goes down Main Street.

The evening performance follows. During the band’s first break there is a live auction, along with the drawings for the belt buckle, the gun, and the 50/50. Winners pay for auction items the same night. A street dance follows. Tickets are sold at the gate when it opens, IDs are checked, and children 12 and under get in free. The Fence Post wrote that visitors fill Lusk’s hotels and restaurants for the weekend. The event’s own lodging list includes the Rawhide Motel and the Covered Wagon Motel.

The man at Rawhide Buttes

The story has been told more than one way. In 1984 the historian Mae Urbanek wrote in The Lusk Herald about an 1849 immigrant train. One member swore he would shoot the first Indian he saw, and he shot a girl near where Lusk now stands. Her tribe surrounded the train. To save his sweetheart, the man gave himself up, and he was skinned alive while the wagons fled. “This incident supposedly named the Rawhide Buttes south of Lusk,” Urbanek wrote.

Ben Hanson’s 2025 account placed the train “in the late 1800s.” In his telling the victim was a tribal princess, and the tribe “had been peaceful.” “The tribe asked that the man be turned over. When the group refused, there was an attack. Eventually, the man gave himself up and was punished. That’s the legend, and that’s what we reenact.” A 2018 piece in Wyoming in Motion had the train bound from Iowa for the California gold rush through Sioux country. It also noted that there are several stories about where the buttes’ name came from.

Doc Reckling’s hill

A Lusk Herald piece, reposted online in 2019, describes the start. Doc Reckling walked “through the browning prairie grass, snapping his galluses,” and above his half-moon specs his eyes followed “the humped form of a pine-darkened hill.” “The germ of an idea sprouted in his head. That was in 1941.”

Urbanek wrote that Dr. Walter E. Reckling conceived the pageant and promoted it, and that the script was written at his request. The pageant’s own pages credit the script to EvaLou “Bonnie” Paris and say she based it on stories passed down through generations. Urbanek gave the author’s name as Eva Lou Bonsell of Lusk. Cowboy State Daily called her EvaLou “Bonnie” Bonsell.

The first performance came in 1946. The Fence Post wrote that it was a fundraiser to help build the county fairgrounds, at a time when returning veterans and local families needed to raise money and reconnect. Wyoming in Motion placed it within that year’s Niobrara County Fair. Urbanek described many covered wagons, some drawn by oxen, and several hundred county residents in the cast, some of them painted as Indians. She wrote that the pageant was produced every summer for about 20 years and was also shown at Crawford, Nebraska, and at the Wyoming State Fair in Douglas. The Herald piece reported that the pageant had “grown in length, polish and importance.” It also said the 16th and 17th presentations would headline that year’s county fair and Lusk’s 75th anniversary.

After the 1950 performances, the board gave $6,000 to the fairgrounds. The pageant’s site puts that at about $60,000 today and says it paid for buildings still in use. Since 1986 another $24,000 has gone to fairgrounds improvements. When a flash flood hit Lusk just before the 2015 pageant, Bredthauer said, the money helped people who lost property. Scholarships go each year to local students, and the scholarship page notes that every recipient has taken part in the Legend. A golf tournament each fall raises more. The board’s motto is “one for all and all for one.”

The 2026 performances were the 80th. Hanson, speaking in 2025, said, “It’s incredible to think we’re still using the original words written nearly 80 years ago.” Bredthauer, in 2019, said few changes had been made to the script. “They added some extra scenes, for instance, we have kids fishing in the fishing pond,” she said. “But the gist of the whole thing is about the same. They didn’t want to change the history of it.”