By Adam Donnelly

Saddle up and mosey on down to the Kamloops Cowboy Festival

Mar 16, 2018 | 4:53 PM

KAMLOOPS — Kamloops has always been a cowboy town. Back in the mid-1800’s Fort Kamloops was one of the first places in the BC interior cattle were brought, thanks to the Hudson’s Bay Company, and from there, ranches sprung up all over the province. For over two decades, the Kamloops Cowboy festival has been celebrating that western way of life. This year marks the 22nd anniversary of the event, so CFJC Today went to the festival to find out what keeps the event’s hundreds of participants climbing back into the saddle year after year.

The 22nd Annual Kamloops Cowboy Festival kicked off Friday at the Coast Conference Centre in Kamloops, hosted by the BC Cowboy Heritage Society, with a specific mandate: preservation of the history of cowboy culture in the province.

“If you look back to the 1860’s, BC wasn’t even a province when the first gold miners started coming in,” Cowboy Festival Chair Mark McMillan explained. “The ranchers came to feed the gold miners; the gold miners ran out of gold and left. The ranchers are still here today and they’re the ones that made the province of BC, BC.”

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Along with vendors from across BC, a number of entertainers will be at the venue all weekend singing songs and reciting poems but don’t expect to see Keith Urban or Faith Hill types.

“It’s not country music,” McMillan specified. “It’s not for cowboys, it’s by cowboys.”

One of this year’s performers is a perennial favourite at the Kamloops Cowboy Festival. Gary Fjellgaard has won multiple Canadian Country Music Awards and a Juno for his work but has been a Cowboy Fest regular for a number years. The 80-year old singer-songwriter is still going strong. He says his favourite part of events like the Cowboy Festival is getting together and playing music with old friends.

“The camaraderie, I guess. And hearing all the cowboy music and cowboy poets, and meeting them again,” Fjellgaard told CFJC Today. “Every couple of years I get to meet all these people again, so it’s a comradeship, I guess.”

For Festival Chair Mark McMillan, hosting events like this an important way to ensure the cowboy way of life is preserved in British Columbia.

“To me, history and heritage are very important,” McMillan said. “Our kids, our grandkids need to know what made this province and how things came about here.”

The Festival runs tonight through Sunday at the Coast Conference Centre on Rogers Way.