Saving Dalton Days
A happy childhood memory finds new life in Meade, Kansas.
By: Jana Bommersbach 01/01/2008
Brent Demmitt grew up with Dalton Days in his hometown of Meade, Kansas, and remembers “it was everything to me—it was always a big deal, especially to a kid like me who wanted to be a cowboy.”
Some 45 miles from Dodge City, Meade was home to Brent’s heroes: the cowboys who re-enacted the infamous Dalton Gang. The original bank/train-robbing brothers—Bob, Emmett and Grat—hid out at their sister Eva’s house when they came to Meade for supplies. J.N. Whipple built the house in 1887 for his bride, and the gang benefited from the rain wash that allowed undetected access to the home from the barn.
Brent still laughs as he recalls how one year, the Dalton Gang re-enactors rode their horses through the Lakeway Hotel (formerly the 1926 Meade Hotel) in downtown that “sits at the only stoplight in the whole county.”
By Brent’s teenaged years, Dalton Days had turned into a phony affair—motorcycles and pickups replaced horses, and the real cowboys sat it out to make room for “guys who thought they were cowboys because they wore boots.” When Brent returned from college in 1997, the local folks no longer celebrated Dalton Days.
“I was told they’d started having them irregularly, every other year or so, and then just stopped having them at all,” he says. He didn’t miss the phony version that he felt had been an embarrassment, but he sure missed the Dalton Days of his youth.
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