The Sedona Heritage Museum is bringing back its Chuckwagon Dinner and Movie fundraiser on Saturday, April 20. Doors open at 4:30 p.m. and the meal starts at 5 p.m., to be followed by a 5:45 p.m. screening of the 1940 Sedona-shot Western “Virginia City,” starring silver screen icons Errol Flynn and Humphrey Bogart.
“Near the end of the Civil War, Julia Hayne [Miriam Hopkins] travels to Libby Prison to convince Cmdr. Vance Irby [Randolph Scott] to help transport gold from Virginia City to the South,” the movie’s description on Rotten Tomatoes states. “Union intelligence agent Kerry Bedford [Flynn] breaks out of the prison and, learning of the plot for the gold, travels to Nevada, meeting Julia on the way. Sensing Julia is attracted to Kerry, Vance asks her to help set a trap while desperados led by Murrell [Bogart] also close in on the gold.”
“That promises a lot of action and intrigue,” Sedona Historical Society Executive Director Nate Meyers said. “It’s hard to beat dinner and a movie. I just always enjoy the smell of the food cooking and campfires going [as well as] throwing on a movie that was filmed here with big Hollywood legends.”
Attendees will be dining on vittles served up by the M Bar Lazy B in an authentically-recreated historical chuckwagon. Additional entertainment may be announced.
Oak Creek Canyon Tours
The Oak Creek Canyon History Tours will be available daily from Tuesday, April 30, through Saturday, May 4. Due to popular demand, an additional day has been added to this year’s schedule.
These guided bus tours leave from the lower parking lot of the museum at 2 p.m. and return at 5 p.m. Each is led by a historian from the Sedona Heritage Museum. The tour takes in numerous historical locations in Oak Creek Canyon. Tickets are $75 for Sedona Historical Society members and $85 for non-members.
“There’s a lot of great historic sites, and you’ll hear a lot of stories from a museum tour guide,” Meyers said. “You’ll get a chance to get out and explore a bunch of stops and experience the canyon in a very different way … There’s history all over the canyon [but] sometimes it’s on private property or behind gates … So these tours give you access to some of that history, historical locations and sites that normally wouldn’t be accessible.”
One of the highlights on the Oak Creek Canyon Tour is the opportunity to visit the homestead of Jim “J.J.” Thompson, Sedona’s first permanent American settler, who made a land claim in Indian Gardens in 1876.
Thompson found American Indian “wickiups still standing and irrigation ditches watering corn, beans and squash,” the Arizona Highways website wrote.
The Yavapai who had lived in Oak Creek Canyon had been removed by the U.S. Army in 1875 and marched to the San Carlos Reservation in Pinal County along with Apache.
The site of the homestead is on private property, but Meyers has made an agreement with the owners to offer tours of the site and the spring.
“I think he called it [Cold Spring] even though his son later said that ‘it wasn’t any colder than any other springs around there,’” Meyers said.
Additional changes and programs are being planned for 2024.
“In 2024, the society will be developing master plans for the improvements and maintenance of both cemeteries that we own, as well as a plan of development and use for the Schuerman-Loy Homestead house on Loy Lane,” SHS President Al Comello wrote in the annual report.
The free “Sedona Stories” speaker series will continue on Thursday, April 11, at 10 a.m., featuring Patrick Schweiss, the executive director of the Sedona International Film Festival, and Thursday, May 9, at 10 a.m., with Julie Richard, CEO of the Sedona Arts Center. Both talks will cover the history of the speakers’ organizations.
Tickets for these events sell out quickly. For more information and to purchase tickets, call (928) 282-7038 or visit SedonaMuseum.org.
