Sharon and Don Meyer | Download this photo
Kansas Profile – Now That’s Rural: Don & Sharon Meyer, chuckwagon
Aug. 2, 2023
By Ron Wilson, director of the Huck Boyd National Institute for Rural Development at Kansas State University
The documentary movie is being filmed in a remote part of the western U.S. Who is feeding the hundreds of cast members and extras in this wilderness?
Would you believe, a Kansas couple with a specially built chuckwagon and grill?
Don and Sharon Meyer are the owners of this remarkable chuckwagon with its built-in gas grill. Don Meyer has always been a skilled handyman and mechanic. He was born in a house that his great-grandfather built in 1909. The house is in Carlton, Kansas, south of Abilene.
Meyer grew up helping his father on the farm and then worked in construction, building grain elevators. He now helps his son run the family feedyard.
“In the mid-1980s, my dad had a party out at the farm,” Meyer said. “People came with their own barbecue cookers, and I thought there ought to be a safer way to do that.”
“I like to build stuff,” he added.
He thought about how to design a portable cooking wagon of his own in the shape of an old-time western chuckwagon. The café in nearby Gypsum was closing, so Meyer bought the stove and saved the grill. He knew a guy who had an old wagon running gear and got some 120-year-old boards from what had been a horse barn near Pratt.
Meyer constructed a metal frame to hold the gas grill, then used the antique wood to build what looked like a chuckwagon, mounted on the old running gear. The result was a chuckwagon with a portable gas-powered grill inside.
“I tried to keep it looking authentic,” Meyer said. The propane fuel tank, for example, is inside what looks like an old wooden barrel.
He started taking it to events and cooking for various groups. “I enjoy cookin’ and servin,’ but the settin’ up is really relaxing for me,” he said.
One year, he was asked to do the annual burger fry for the county 4-H program. “We usually get about 50 people,” he was told.
Two weeks before the event, he got another call: “There are 200 people coming….!”
Meyer went out and found another running gear and built a larger wagon. Together, the wagons had enough capacity to prepare food for the entire group.
For a time, Meyer operated a weekend restaurant in Colorado. He also took his wagon out for special events. He met and married Sharon, and eventually, they moved back to his hometown of Carlton where they live today.
“I like to barbecue,” Meyer said. “I started out doin’ burgers, but now we’ve cooked everything. One time I served shrimp to the generals at Fort Warren.”
Don and Sharon have been part of some remarkable events. “We went on wagon trains in California and Wyoming,” Meyer said. One trip was 22 days long. Their largest event was putting on a thousand-person pancake feed for a nursing home facility in Loveland, Colorado.
Another trip was a ten-day trek to the infamous Hole-in-the-Wall in the remote mountains of Wyoming where Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid used to hide out. The woman who arranged the trip wanted to celebrate with steaks and salad on the trip’s last day, but in that region there were no stores and no refrigeration.
“We had to get a generator and a freezer to keep the supplies frozen until the last day of the trip,” Meyer said.
Meyer continues to build things. “I’ve built a double-lined smoker and two corn roasters. We like to do it,” he said.
Sharon enjoys teaching about chuckwagons and the old western lifestyle. “We’ve met people from all over the world, and we’ve made wonderful friends,” she said.
It’s great to find this resource in a rural community such as Carlton, population 40 people. Now, that’s rural.
For more information, contact the Meyers at 785-949-2230.
It’s time to leave the movie location where Don was feeding hundreds of cast members from his specially equipped chuckwagon. We salute Don and Sharon Meyer for making a difference with their creative handiwork and appreciation of history.
Wagons Ho!
Audio and text files of Kansas Profiles are available at http://www.kansasprofile.com. For more information about the Huck Boyd Institute, interested persons can visit http://www.huckboydinstitute.org.
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