Story · Bandera
Bandera’s Cowboy Mardi Gras is a long weekend of parade, gumbo cook-off, and Cajun, zydeco, and Texas country music that draws thousands to a town of about 829. This is how it started.
They threw the first beads down Main Street on February 22, 2003, and people ducked.
Nobody in Bandera knew what they were. Two women were up in the bucket of a front-end loader throwing handfuls of plastic beads at people, and most of them just wondered why somebody was throwing things at them. The city permit cost ten dollars.
I have lived here eight years and been to every one since, and every year guests ask me what it is and how it started. I never had a good answer, so I went and found the people who started it.
Eldon and Susanne Reed bought the 11th Street Cowboy Bar on December 15, 2002. They did not live in Bandera yet — Eldon had been leasing land out here to hunt, got a right of first refusal, and was building a cabin on twenty acres. He came home that December and told Susanne, “Well, we bought 11th Street.”
The inventory was seven cases of beer.
They noticed the thing everybody in this town notices. Winter is dead, merchants suffer January and February, and there is nothing to bring anyone in.
Everybody knows Cowboy Mardi Gras came out of Louisiana. What almost nobody says is which Louisiana.
Our own Backroads page said New Orleans. I wrote that without checking, and it was wrong.
Eldon Reed is Cajun. He did not speak English until he started school. Born in Lake Charles, people from Basile, Eunice, Mamou, Crowley — the prairie country west of Lafayette. What he grew up with is the country version. Farming communities, men on horseback riding house to house in masks, begging ingredients, everything going into one pot at the end of the day. He described it plainly: you will see chickens strapped to the sides of the horses, because that is what the gumbo gets made out of. The costumes are homemade, and Susanne says they look like they are made out of rags.
“That’s the real thing,” she said.
So the horses in that first parade were not a Texas addition to a Louisiana party. They were the oldest part of it. Everything else got adapted. The horses were already right.
The first parade had three entries.
Eldon drove his own antique Mack truck. They rented a stagecoach from Kelly Scott — the man who sits up at the park with the chuck wagon, who has been here forever — and he drove it with Susanne and Vicki Adams riding along. And Cecil Freeman drove the front-end loader with Patricia Moore and Linda James up in the bucket.
There is a reason Patricia was in it. The Hill Country flooded in July of 2002 and she had to be rescued out of the visitor center, in that same loader. So the following February, when the Reeds needed a parade, she called the man who had carried her out of high water and asked whether he would carry her down Main Street instead.
He said yes. He brought his dog.
MD rode up in the cab beside him — a small squatty golden mutt who could put his paws together like he was praying and flip a coaster off his nose and catch it. Patricia and Linda rode in the bucket under parasols with a case of beads between them.
The Reeds rented their costumes that year. After the parade a longhorn calf got out, and Eldon spent that evening chasing it around the place dressed like Little Lord Fauntleroy. Nobody photographed that either, which I consider a genuine loss.
The reason any of it worked was Port Arthur. There is a bar down there called the Boudin Hut, and the Reeds knew that crowd. Eldon hired the house band, Jesse Stewart & Ridin’ High, and the Boudin Hut regulars more or less shut their own bar down and drove over. They brought the costumes. They knew how it was supposed to go. Bandera did not, and learned it by watching.
Susanne says she went to every merchant in town beforehand with a bead catalog. “I said, this is for everyone. It’ll be small at first. But it will be good for your business.”
There was a scavenger hunt too — items hidden around town that got you a discount at whichever store they belonged to. It walked people through every door on Main Street.
The first Cowboy Mardi Gras was not a bar throwing a party. It was an economic plan with a parade attached. It is now, from what Susanne has been told, the biggest sales tax month of the year in Bandera.
The second year Eldon wore a tuxedo jacket covered entirely in Crown Royal bags. He had built a house for a woman who wanted a sewing room, so they bought the jacket, he brought her all the bags people had given them over the years, and she did the rest. He does not drink the stuff. It was the right color. They still have it, and Frontier Times Museum has talked to them about a section.
The date is not an accident either. The weekend before Fat Tuesday is the big one everywhere in Louisiana and southeast Texas, which is exactly why Bandera does not use it.
“If you want people to come to your event, don’t do it then. So we backed it up a week.”
You cannot book a Cajun band on the big weekend — they are all working at home. And the people who come here do not have to miss their own party. They come to Bandera one weekend, then go home for their own the next.
Patricia Moore has fielded complaints about the date for years. People from Houston tell her it conflicts with the rodeo. Her answer is that Bandera can’t move Mardi Gras unless somebody gets the Pope to change when Fat Tuesday falls. That is also why it moves. It follows Easter. Next year it lands in January.
One thing I did not expect, and Susanne brought it up on her own.
“The city fought us on everything when we moved here. They didn’t want Cajun people.”
She says they have gotten a few apologies over the years. And she was clear about one other thing.
“It is not 11th Street Cowboy Bar Mardi Gras. It never was. It’s Cowboy Mardi Gras. It was for the whole town.”
Which is why she walked Main Street with that bead catalog.
They owned the bar three years and sold it to friends. Then James McGroarty bought it in April of 2006 and built it into what people know now — the amphitheater, the big acts, fifteen thousand people. He deserves that credit and Susanne is the first one to give it.
If you go looking you will find the anniversary numbers do not line up. The count starts over somewhere after 2006.
The first one was 2003.
No photographs of that first parade have turned up. The Reeds were in it, not watching it, and there was no website until 2004 — they built that business on a clipboard and an email list.
What they do have is the newspaper. February 19, 2003, announcing the first one. And on the same front page, a story about an author doing a book signing at Backroads Books. That store eventually sold to Pat Harrison, and down the line to the people we bought Backroads from.
Our name and the first Cowboy Mardi Gras, same page, same week, twenty-three years ago.
I did not know that until I sat down at their table.
So here is what I am after. If you were around for 2003, 2004, 2005 and you have photographs, send them to us. Especially if you came over from Port Arthur and helped teach this town how to do it.
Somebody has a picture of a front-end loader with two women under parasols in the bucket and a dog in the cab. I would like to find it.
Twenty-two years after three vehicles and a ten-dollar permit, a TV crew came through — Staycation Sports, on the Destination Channel. They filmed our Doe Creek house and rode in the parade with us. Three guys from Los Angeles who could not get over the horses. The episode is called Longhorn Luxury.
Eldon and Susanne Reed are still in Bandera. When they built Bandera’s Mardi Gras, neither of them had ever been to the one in New Orleans.
Go see it. Cowboy Mardi Gras is the weekend a week before Fat Tuesday, so it moves every year. Bandera events · Bandera · Downtown Bandera