DEWEY'S GOT TALENT

track with oxen and rollers. Took him eighty eight days to get it up there. And I tell tourists up there that it was a high end grocery store for its day. You know, if you were out in the area, you wanted to go to the Bartle's store because the Nanny Journey Cake Bartles carried everything and it stayed open as it traveled to Dewey. But when he put it down, Dewey was founded, and he named it after Admiral Dewey from the Battle of Manila, which took place as they

were building the hotel. So it just became the center point of early day history in the area and one of the few big things that's preserved in our local history. And Jake Bartles was just a revered mayn and he was the squire, a Civil War veteran. He started the Dewey Round Up rodeo, and so they used to have a Jake Bartle's Day that was celebrated on June eleventh usually that's his birthday. So I found all these old records they had a parade and all these things for

kids to you on Jake Bartle's Day. So we're just trying to revive that. So we came up with we wanted to do it last year, but it was so dang hot it was too late. So in the spring we started our campaign for due. He's got talent and it's a talent show. That takes place on June fourteenth, Flag Day, and we're not going to have a parade. I think that's in the future. But the City of Dwey came up with some prize money to help us produce the talent show, and so the city and the

hotel are going to put on this talent show. But it's for contestants. It can only be doing residents understood, And we're hoping that all the talent comes out of the woodwork. It's all part of our campaign of celebrating the small town. We do it at Christmas. We have a great visiting place for Santa Christmas, and so we're

hoping that the talent comes out of the woodwork. On excuse me, you have to come by the hotel and get an entry for me and that doesn't cost you anything to enter all ages, all types of talent we were talking about. There was a little boy from he was He saw our poster and he said, could I enter it? And I said, do you live in Dewey. He said no. His dad says, we live out by Hudson Lake and I think it's Old Sage County. I said, well,

that's not Dewey. I said, you got be in Dewey and he says, but I have a really great talent. I said, what's your talent and he says, I know every animal in the world. Oh well, my goodness, Yeah, that's a talent. Then asked me if I knew what a platypus was. Oh yeah, and I got the country wrong. I said Madagascar and he said, no, it's Australia. Dang it. I knew that this nine year old beat me. So we're all kinds of talent, reciting poetry, playing the violin.

Surely there's an old fiddle player out there, you know, without spitting tobacco can show up. We've got one entry so far. Now you have to come by the hotel to fill out the form. It's a very short form just basically it's very short, but we take the form and keep it because you have to have one filled

out to enter the contest. So we're encouraging people to drop by the hotel Tuesday through Saturday and the tour guys have it all ready to hand you and they sign you up and it doesn't cost anything, and we record you and then on Saturday, the June fourteenth, at six o'clock, we've got three judges, including the mayor of Dewey, so it's kind of high falutin. Earl Sears and I were going to be the MC's that would be fun. My brother and I don't generally do a whole lot together,

but when we do, we're crazy. But anyway, it promises to be a really fun talent show. And then immediately following the talent show, we have a Jake Bartole's birthday party celebration and we do a small history pageant at the beginnings of Dewey and Judge Allen Gentis is playing Jake Bartoles. We have an actress from Tulsa who comes in to play Nanny journey Cake and the two of them when they got married back in the eighteen seventies

in Kansas. He had just returned from the Civil War back to Kansas met her and the only way for people that really had land back in Indian Territory times was to marry into the Indian nations. And Jake Bartle's married a Delaware lady who was the chief daughter Nanny journey Cake. Well, she had education and money in her land. Allotment was where the hotel was built, and this is Delaware, country, and it was Delaware money that helped build the hotel.

And to this date, why the big Powwow just ended for the Delaware You know what a spectacular time that is. So there's lots of history associated with the hotel, and our little history pageant is going to It's only about thirty minutes long, but it's fun. It has all the townspeople and how Dewy began. And it's written and directed by Shelby Brammer.

families interested in living here. It's taken an arts scene, a sports scene, a high quality educational level, unlike any other town in Oklahoma really I mean under certainly under one hundred thousand population, and so we've always benefited from that in Bartlesville in the arts. So we're just kind of carrying on a tradition, I think. And then we have spirits at the hotel, which jumping to that, I'm very comfortable about that the spirits there over the one hundred.

They're celebrating one hundred and twenty five years of the hotel being open. And I always worry about how the spirits feel about the things that happened, because they've been there forever and they really are there and they're very friendly spirits, and they like to see the hotel prosper and so I can tell that there's an up feeling inside the hotel with all this Jake Bartle's celebration coming back. It just used to be a big deal. So we're trying to revive, revive that and make it a yearly

destination with tourist towns. Being a destination is an important thing, you bet, and Pahaska has become a destination town and Bartlefield benefits from that. We get lots of visitors at the Hotel and the other museums here from people heading over there to the Pioneer Woman and seeing the Ben Johnson and the Cavalcade and the Prairie Preserve, and it's just really helped. I mean, we used to go play in Plaska. Whoever dreamed it was going to become the

you know what. It has become a food capital, but it's a that's a destination town. And and Bartlesville has always kind of edged on that with their their oil history and Phillips and in the wool of Rock, the nice things that we have in our area, you know, and in wool of Rock you know, Frank Phillips gave back to his community. He did, and that's what it takes for a striving community. LBJ gave back to Johnson City and it still thrives as a result of someone

or the big I guess Johnson Ranch. And then Jake Bartles did the same thing with Dewey in the Bartlesville area. You know, he was a man of vision. He was originally a New Jersey man, but he had vision. It came down here in the Civil War when this was all occupied Confederacy, Northern Cherokee Lands and the Cherokee had been kind of bullied that capitulated into joining the Confederacy, and they did. The Confederacy did not want an invasion from Kansas of Texas and Arkansas, so they put troopers

in this area. U Highway sixty during the Civil War was called the California Highway, and it hugged Kansas and it was a military road for the Confederacy, but it also kept bike people out of the middle of the Indian Nations where there really wasn't any law to protect them. And if you got out of line in Indian Territory, you went to Fort Smith and faced the hanging Judge Judge Parker. So it was just it was an interesting time for history and there were plenty of Civil War

battles in the area, skirmishes. The Confederacy had half Cherokee half half Confederate uniforms. They had had their own unique way of dressing for military and the Cherokee were involved in the Battle of Pea Ridge. And it was just but our area of the country between the Sky took had one of the bigger battles in the Civil War over in eastern Oklahoma by Grove. So we live in northern Cherokee Lands, which being the biggest tribe of the five civilized tribes, it was quite a focal point during

the Civil War. So that's when Jake Bartles first came down to this area and saw how fertile it was, especially for wheat, and that's what he and his wife invested in, was a wheat business. So we're going to try to revive a lot of that. And mister Bartle's was a lot of fun. He gave back to the community. That's what I was saying earlier. There are men who give back to their communities that makes them thrive as communities. And Dewey has always thrived as a separate little town

from Bartleville. It's not a sand springs to Tulsa. Dewey's always been his own little entity, and they're a tough little town. I've always enjoyed it, but they certainly have a very rich history in our area. And now the rodeo days Jake Bartle's started that. Mister Bartles was dying in nineteen oh eight and his bucket list was to see his old Civil War buddies. So they brought them down from Kansas and put them up in the hotel and the outfront, they said, there was hundreds of tents,

and so all these old veterans showed up. They put on a Wild West show for what the locals did, and so that turned out to be the beginnings of the Dewey Round of Rodeo and it just became so popular. And one of the things that made it popular was mister Bartle's insisted that the men and women who started the first Wild West show there for the old soldiers,

that they always be able to participate. So through its whole beginning to its very end, the rodeo would allow a young wrangler from one of the local ranchers to compete against professionals like Bill Pickett who and steer wrestling, and the crowds love to see the underdogs go home with thousands of dollars and that's always fun to see. And so that just forty thousand people came to Little Old Dewey and there were no hotels to take them in, so everybody camped. That's a lot of camping, a lot

of it's a lot of cookware. Wow, Yeah, that's a lot. But it was something that it became a destination every summer. Dewey was a destination, and so it'd be nice to see all that happen again for the area and Pahaska people travel in. Just the other day I had North Carolina visitors at the hotel, and they're here to eat at the Pioneer Woman, and these people look up places along the way that they want to see. And there was an Outlaw tour, which gave us the idea that

maybe we could put together a string of hotels. There's one in Pawnee. There's the m at Dalton House here that's on its way to being opened. Over on the west side of our Bartlesville, the Dewey Hotel. There's the Dalton Brothers Museum in Coffeeville and that, and there's the Benders Museum up in Cherryville. And the Benders certainly is the ending a lot of horrible prairie scary story that would make a great Netflix series. But what an amazing

time period that was. And it was a lot of old Union soldiers that helped settle Southeast Kansas after the war, and they were a lot of the Benders victims out on the prairie. But the Outlaw Trail, I think would be a lot of fun and a Pasco would be on there with there, so you know, there would be like five museums on an outlaw tour that we're just getting more people to coming into the area. Something that

they look up things to do. And Dewey Hotel. Uh, it's just in the mansion over in Coffeeville, the Brown Mansion, anything that and they love the wool of rock logs. So so we're hoping all that happens. We want to make Dewey a hot spot in the summertime for entertainment and celebrating our local history.

of movies. But we want people to show up to show support for the dew. He's got talent. But the main thing is coming on here today was to talk about if you've got a talent, if grandpa, you know, if grandpa plays the spoons, get him out there. It's it would be a lot of fun to see the locals come out and show their talent, tap dancing, break dancing, anything that that shows you have a talent. And I say poetry, poetry. Being able to write and say poetry

is always a talent. So anything you've got, bring it.