The story
Chuck Wagon Festival in Oklahoma City
The Chuck Wagon Festival, held at the National Cowboy and Western Heritage Museum in Oklahoma City, celebrates cowboy trail-cooking culture with chuck wagon cooking competitions, cowboy poetry and music, gunfighter demonstrations, and family activities across the museum's grounds, typically held on a weekend in May each year.
Long before refrigerated trucks and roadside diners, cowboys driving cattle across the open range in the nineteenth century depended on a single mobile kitchen to keep them fed for weeks at a time: the chuck wagon, a specially outfitted wagon stocked with dry goods, cooking equipment, and a fold-down cabinet worktable that traveled alongside the herd.