Calling all local cowboys, cowgirls and lovers of all things Wild West. Do you ever imagine what a Durango of yesterday looked like when horses roamed Main Street, when the jingle of spurs replaced the jangle of change in your pocket to fill the parking meter, where coffee was more cowboy and less convenient and disputes at local watering holes were sometimes settled at sundown in the street?
Well, now you can relive the Wild West in all of its glory from Oct. 2-6 during the 35th Annual Durango Cowboy Gathering and celebrate Durango’s Western heritage at its finest. This year the gathering will host a horseback social. Main Street will take a page out of Durango’s rural history books and be open to transport by horseback only allowing participants and spectators a chance to saddle up and mingle with the community. It will give community members the opportunity to take a step back to when the West may have been wilder but also simpler.
With the ever-changing climate of downtown Durango inciting heated feelings from both sides, this is one week where we can all celebrate change. Sometimes, to change we need to look back to see how far we are from where we came. The city of Durango may tout a progressive approach to change and design but there is a difference in being progressive and the concept of progress.
You can approach a community with new ideas and be progressive or you can approach a community with progress and move forward in space and time, which requires one to look back and consider past space and time in future decision-making. The community of Durango today, is filled with decision-makers who are far more rhinestone than Wrangler and we need to lasso back a little control before our heritage disappears like wild horses over the horizon.
With the great bump-out dilemma and widening of sidewalks to shrink streets, our community is in a Wild West duel of its own, between yesterday and today and we couldn’t be further apart. The Durango of yesterday and the city of today turned their backs, took 10 paces and kept on going. Events like the Cowboy Gathering, give us, as a community, the opportunity to turn back around and face one another and realize that a better future can’t happen without including our history.
In the City of Durango’s ever-changing redesign concept, what they fail to recognize is that people who live here and people who visit here alike make that choice for what Durango is and was not what it can be. We need to pull our community up by the bootstraps. People come to Durango to see the West and the West is wild.
The landscape of the Great American West and Durango itself is much different from it was 100 years ago and while progress is inevitable, history is invaluable. The Cowboy Gathering gives us a chance to not only recreate it but to recall it and consider where we are as a community today.
It’s hard to believe but there was a time that Durango was year round, what the Cowboy Gathering Celebrates for a few days. Durango was founded on agricultural, ranching, cowboy and mining roots, on trades that seem swept under the bump outs today. There was a time when the manure shoveled downtown had more to do with horses than the streets they rode in on.
We may not be able to bring back the “Good ol’ days” but we can preserve our rural heritage by enjoying and participating in events that allow all of to be cowboys, it just feels good to get back to our community’s roots and boots.
For a moment in time, the Cowboy Gathering allows residents and visitors alike the opportunity to put on their boots and bandannas and take a step back in time to see historical trades like blacksmiths and saddle makers up close and personal. To enjoy a chuck wagon breakfast and cowboy coffee, to hear a harmonica carry on the breeze and to hear a cowboy strum timeless songs on his guitar. To hear storytellers and consider a different outlook on life, to live the cowboy way for a few days and to learn that there is authenticity and peace in your soul that comes with all things wild, even in the West.
