Wild West Day!

Cedar Rapids, IA – August 8, 2008 – The City of Cedar Rapids Parks and Recreation Department is pleased to announce that the Ushers Ferry Wild West Weekend gang will be taking its show on the road to Squaw Creek Park in Marion, for a special performance of historical demonstrations and old-west gunfights to celebrate and support Ushers Ferry Historic Village. Ushers Ferry was severely damaged by the flood of 2008, and has been closed to the public since that time. As a result the ever-popular Wild West Weekend event, usually held during the Freedom Festival, has been rescheduled to Saturday, September 13^th from 11:00 a.m. to 5:00 p.m.

 Thanks to the generous assistance of the Linn County Conservation Board, the event will take place at the Meadow Lark Pavilion in Squaw Creek Park and will feature a living history encampment and boomtown “tent city” with period music and demonstrations of open fire cooking, blacksmithing, roping, horsemanship and other period skills and crafts. In addition, reenactors will perform a variety of historical skits and gunfights throughout the day and a special Old West Melodrama performance will be given by the Ushers Ferry Parlour Theatre players.

 The event will be free to the public, however donations will be accepted to support both Ushers Ferry programming and flood recovery efforts of the historical village. Old West reenactment groups from the tri-state area who have pledged their support of both the event and the village include: Willi’s Territorial Roughriders, a regional organization comprised of members from Wisconsin, Illinois and Iowa; the Red Cedar Regulators, a local group from the Cedar Rapids area; the Kishwaukee Valley Vigilance Committee from Illinois, and the Hole in the Sock Gang from MacGregor, Iowa.

 Squaw Creek Park is easily accessible from Highway 13 by taking the Highway 100 bypass west to Banner Drive. Turn south on Banner Drive to the park entrance and follow the signs to the Meadow Lark Pavilion. For more information regarding the event, please call Ushers Ferry at 319-286-5763.