2011 Indian Peace Treaty pageant might be last

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PHOTO COURTESY OF GOOGLE IMAGES Above a marker near Medicine Lodge, Kan., displays the history that led to peace treaties between the Kiowa, Comanche, Arapaho, Apache and Cheyenne tribes with the U.S. government. A pageant commenmorating the peace treaties is in jeopardy due to lack of money and volunteers.

MEDICINE LODGE, Kan. (AP) – A September tradition in southern Kansas that celebrates 300 years of the state’s history might become history itself after this year’s event because of a lack of money and volunteers, organizers said.
The Medicine Lodge Indian Peace Treaty Pageant has drawn thousands of people to the south central town where the pageant has been held every three to five years since it began in 1927.

But it requires help from nearly all the town’s 2,300 residents and interest in participating has dropped in recent years, The Wichita Eagle reported recently.
The pageant, held in a natural amphitheater, typically draws between 10,000 and 15,000 visitors from Kansas and across the nation. This year’s will be the 23rd pageant.
The focus is a re-enactment of the signing of an 1867 treaty that was supposed to make traveling safer for those heading to frontier settlements in the West.
It also one of the largest gatherings of Plains Indians – 15,000 Kiowa, Comanche, Arapaho, Apache and Cheyenne.
“It is with great sadness that possibly this will be our last one,” wrote Robert Larson, one of the pageant’s board members, in an email to The Eagle.
“It has become difficult to get community support and financial assistance to continue this wonderful event, as you probably know once you lose something like this it is almost impossible for a small community to get it back.”
Sara Whelan, the president of the Medicine Lodge Peace Treaty Pageant, said board members voted to resign after this year’s Sept. 23-25 pageant. A community meeting will be held to determine the pageant’s future. Whelan said if new people volunteer to organize the festival, it will continue.
“That’s what we are all hoping for – but it has been difficult getting new people involved,” Whelan said.
The pageant focuses on 300 years of Kansas and American history – including the Spanish conquistadors who came to the area in the 1500s, frontiersmen, the Lewis and Clark expedition and Indians on horseback.
It includes an 80-mile longhorn cattle drive between Bucklin to Medicine Lodge in the days before the festival starts, a ranch rodeo, a muzzleloaders encampment, a Western art show and an Indian encampment.

Dave Webb, assistant director at the Kansas Heritage Center in Dodge City, said he has been to the pageant several times and plans to attend this year to celebrate the 150th anniversary of Kansas.

If the pageant ends, Webb said, “It would be the end of an era. It is a novel idea to take a lawn chair or blanket and sit out in the great outdoors and watch history happen where it happened.”
The state has fewer major benefactors to support such events and younger people don’t have the same interests as their parents or grandparents, said Jay Price, director of the public history program at Wichita State University.

“I think the whole idea of a pageant was a product of a particular time and era,” Price said. “We saw a lot of them at the turn of the 20th century. Maintaining them has always been the challenge.”