Are you going to the dinner and dance this year?” is the annual question usually asked by county residents at the beginning of the summer. If the answer was a resounding “yes!” then you didn’t have to answer the second question: “How long have YOU lived here?”
The residency requirement was important as one either had to be born in the county or had lived here for 30 years. The elimination of that requirement a few years back has made so many folks feel more welcome in their adopted community.
Another significant change has been when the event is held. This year, the Rio Blanco Pioneers Association has changed the date from early summer here to the beginning of August. It continues to be a great way for everyone who lives here or lived here long ago to come enjoy the social time with all of the community. The dinner and dance continue to be a highlight of the event.
In addition, it gives everyone a chance to learn more about the pioneers and their settlement, as well as to honor the settlers who came before them. The Pioneers Association hosts the event and their volunteers, small in number and mighty indeed, guarantee that the stories of their families are told casually around the table or included in some way with the family stories and pictures that are gathered that year during the event.
Talk of the old-time recipes that one can find in the local cookbooks and one of the most authentic combines things easily obtained in this isolated countryside: venison, apples, and lard. I assumed they got the cinnamon or nutmeg somewhere else and the other potatoes. The Ruckman/Oldland family recipe dates back to the mid 1880s. Harp transportation offered the stagecoach rides back and forth from Rifle to Meeker, and it was Audrey Oldland (nee Ruckman) who provided the family mincemeat pie recipe from the two stagecoach stop near Rifle.
Gathering the Meeker Cookbook recipes 43 years ago by co-author and friend Linda Tempel tasted the original recipe, when Mrs. Audrey Oldland told us her family story about the two cooks, local women, who had made it known that they requested to be buried with all of their recipes. The one that has been passed down in those two families was the original one, as a family member worked for the ladies and remembered the original recipe.
You can still see the old stagecoach stop off Hwy. 13 on the way back down from Rio Blanco Hill to Rifle. You can spot the dilapidated building in a big open field and not long after see a big, old white farmhouse with a new gate sign proclaiming Roan Creek Ranch.
If you are not able to attend the Rio Blanco Pioneers Association Dinner and Dance this year, you’ll have to be content with the old stories told so well by the original pioneers and their families, available in photographic exhibits and letters posted in exhibits at the White River Museum, the three volumes of local oral histories, as well as the “This is What I Remember” bound editions. The archives of the oldest editorial columns that are used in the Herald’s “Days Gone By” celebrate or start the ol’ grapevine. The news they don’t add after the reports of town doings and the local columns of social happenings was “a good time was had by all.”
By Dolly Viscardi