Community Celebrates Gold Rush Days

The tents were up. Campfires were blazing with coffee pots keeping their black gold hot over the open fire. The cooks were busy serving heaping helpings of scrambled eggs and biscuits and gravy as gunslingers and saloon matrons were practicing their crafts. Across the grass, vendors were displaying their goods of art, delectable foods, tasty drinks unique combinations of sweet and spicy and craftsmen and craftswomen displaying their skills.

The event, Sidney Gold Rush Days, took place at Legion Park June 8-10.

The weekend included reenactments of street gunfights by Gold Canyon Gun Fighters, a presentation by historian and storyteller Gordy Wilkins, guitarist and Native American flutist Michael Murphy, David Marsh and his presentation on Music of the Germanic Lands, and local author Patricia Campbell. Campbell is the author of "Deadwood in My Blood," and "Best of the West."

Among the displays were crafts as done in the days of the gold rush: the tanners, the blacksmith and the lathe operator.

Teresa Smith and her family have been part of the Sidney community for about nine years. They have raised chickens, goats and organic beef. The farming lead to the tanning.

"When we started butchering our goats, it seemed like a waste not to use the whole animal," she said.

The goal of using the who animal resulted in her learning how to process skins for leather.

"I've been demonstrating here for three to four years," she said. "It is kind of a hobby of mine."

Part of the motivation is her frugal approach to life, using everything you have. She compares it to a field to table approach, except with leather. She said when it is fully cleaned, goat skin is white and very durable.

Ken Geu is president of the 15th Annual Sidney Gold Rush Days committee, and provided an exhibit of a wood lathe. The lathe, a spring-pull lathe, is a design from the mid-1750s with a history dating back to the 1500s. It is, at its simplest, a wood design that can be disassembled and carried to the forest where tree branches can be fashioned at the site. The man, typically, who made the chair legs was known as a "chair bodger." Geu said the last chair bodger, believed to be in the 1940s, could make up to 144 chair pieces in a day. Geu's lathe is fashioned after the Roy Underhill design. He attended a Roy Underhill class in North Carolina.

He has adapted the wood lathe with variable tension and adjustable foot pedal.