This Thanksgiving, thousands of Texans will lace up their sneakers to run a few miles in turkey trots across the state. But in the small South Texas town of Cuero, ninety miles southeast of San Antonio, devoted revelers converge a month earlier for a literal turkey trot. Most of the events at Turkeyfest, the community’s fall extravaganza, are typical small-town Texas festival fare: a parade, a barbecue cook-off, concerts, and a jalapeño-eating competition. But the main attraction is the Great Gobbler Gallop, a live turkey race that celebrates more than a century of Cuero’s rich turkey history.
Turkeyfest is the latest iteration of a long line of turkey-related festivities in Cuero. The tradition dates back to the late 1800s, when local farmers would drive turkeys on foot across the countryside to sell at the market every autumn. The birds were presented to visiting buyers, slaughtered, processed, and shipped to arrive in northeastern cities in time for Thanksgiving—likely explaining why the festival has long been held in October, not November, as you might expect. The sight of thousands of turkeys parading down Main Street attracted crowds, and legend has it that one of the big-city turkey buyers admired the scene and made a remark along the lines of “You should do something with this,” planting the seed that an annual turkey drive could be a stand-alone attraction for the town. For the past fifty or so years, the Great Gobbler Gallop has played up a lighthearted rivalry between Cuero and Worthington, Minnesota. Both towns call themselves the Turkey Capital of the World; to settle the debate over who truly deserves the title and award bragging rights for the year to come, Worthington ships one of its turkeys to race a Cuero bird at Turkeyfest each year.
I attended the fifty-second annual Turkeyfest, and spirits were high on the morning of October 12, just before the Great Gobbler Gallop. The racing turkeys, Cuero’s Ruby Begonia and Worthington’s Paycheck (so named “because nothing goes faster than your paycheck”) lined up on the intersection of Esplanade and Main, waiting for the signal to start as hundreds of onlookers clogged the sidewalks, vying for a better view. Many of those in attendance wore Cuero Gobblers football jerseys and pins reading “Ruby Begonia for President.” The towns’ racing teams—volunteers who run behind the birds to keep them moving in the right direction—braced themselves. When released from their cages, both birds went running. Paycheck trotted straight into the sidelines, racking up a number of penalties in the process, and Ruby Begonia sprinted full steam ahead. Paycheck could barely keep up, with Ruby speeding down the finish line in less than 43 seconds and the crowd erupting into applause. For the fourth year in a row, Ruby had won the comically large Traveling Turkey Trophy of Tumultuous Triumph, while the loser took home the comparatively puny Circulating Consolation Cup of Consummate Commiseration.
Half of each bird’s score had already been recorded a month earlier at the King Turkey Day in Worthington in September. Ruby Begonia emerged the victor of that race, too—officially with a thirty-second lead, with some Cuero citizens in attendance speculating that it was more like two minutes. “The embellishment of a win in Texas is okay,” argued 2012 Turkey Trot Sultan Yekrut Joe Adams. Embellished or not, all parties agreed that Ruby was the undisputed winner. And Paycheck? “We need a new bird. I hope he doesn’t make it home,” said Lonny Johnson, of the Worthington team, in remarkably high spirits after the loss.
Cuero’s first official turkey trot took place in 1912, with more than 30,000 spectators (including the then-governor of Texas, Oscar Branch Colquitt) watching at least 18,000 turkeys march down Main. Farmers attempted to herd the turkeys by scattering corn and corralling them with sticks, but the local Rio Grande breed of turkeys was free-range in the truest sense, and birds were found in trees and bushes for days after the trot. The event at that time did not include a footrace, though it would not have been the first in the nation. That honor goes to Buffalo, New York, which held its first turkey trot in 1896. The phrase “turkey trot” seems to have originated with a salacious ragtime dance, of which the Vatican disapproved.
Cuero didn’t add a human footrace until 2007, but its shenanigans have long extended beyond the parading of turkeys. Over the decades, Cuero’s turkey trots were accompanied by live music, marching bands, horseback riders, bicyclists, and more; turkey-themed floats sponsored by local businesses were designed with hay or turkey feathers, and some even showcased live caged poultry. The surrounding festivities took on a Turkish theme, with a coronation crowning Sultan Yekrut (turkey spelled backward) and Sultana Oreuc (Cuero spelled backward), who were nominated by a secret society of Cuero townspeople. Some years featured a fashion show, with young women walking the runway in gowns with turkey feather trains more than forty feet long. In 1920 Cuero even sent a turkey to the White House for President Woodrow Wilson’s turkey pardon, where it lost a fight with a bird from Kentucky.
Cuero continued to host turkey trots every few years (with the exception of the Great Depression, when it occurred with more frequency in hopes of keeping up local morale, and a pause in festivities during the two World Wars). The event was an expensive labor of love and a logistical challenge, with exhausted organizers needing a lengthy break in between trot years. “It was an extravaganza,” says Alan Kahlich, who grew up in Cuero and was part of the 1975 and ’76 Turkeyfest racing teams. During the event’s golden age, in 1972, it was the subject of a national TV news segment broadcast by CBS; that same year, the Goodyear blimp even flew by. “That was the city’s centennial,” recalled Kahlich, who had the opportunity to fly in the blimp that year. “The local tire company sold Goodyear tires and had enough pull to get them to the ’72 celebration.” But a decline in the regional turkey farming industry, combined with a shift in turkey breeding to favor larger “broad-breasted,” i.e., too fat to fly or march, breeds caused Cuero to cease the turkey trot that same year.
Luckily, in 1973, Cuero learned about Worthington, which has its own history of turkey farming and parading. Members of both communities agreed to the idea of a turkey race, and the Great Gobbler Gallop has been hosted annually ever since (except in 2020). 2012 marked the hundredth anniversary of the first turkey trot, and organizers paid homage to the original format by fusing elements of Turkeyfest and the turkey trot. Flocks of turkeys were paraded down Main, and the Turkish ball came back in full swing. “My wife and my sister made my costume,” says Adams. “I wear a black cowboy hat all the time, and they said I had to wear a king’s hat. I didn’t know about all that, so they designed the turban around my cowboy hat.” Ruby Begonia made Cuero proud and swept the Great Gobbler Gallop that year. “Paycheck fell to pieces and Ruby was doing him pretty bad,” says Adams. “So I picked that turkey up and ran him across the finish line. But I made damn sure Ruby still won.”
Cuero takes the process of selecting Ruby Begonia seriously. The racing turkey is chosen in June or July; because sprightly Rio Grande turkeys are difficult to come by, farmers look to heritage breeders or even capture wild turkeys to compete. “I don’t know how many years ago it was, I came across a turkey nest of eight or ten eggs down by the railroad track,” said Adams. “We got a Ruby out of that batch.” Over the years, the selection process has become a party unto itself, with Cuero shutting down Main to race five or six birds in a test run. Though Ruby might be the same bird for a few years in a row, each is ultimately retired after a few Turkeyfests. “They get too used to people and don’t run away anymore,” says longtime Turkeyfest board member and turkey breeder Cory Thamm.
Transporting Ruby Begonia from Cuero to Minnesota every year is just as complex. The racing bird undergoes a full checkup to ensure that he or she is healthy and won’t bring any fowl-borne diseases to Worthington. “We call the office of agriculture in Minneapolis, which is used to dealing with large numbers of livestock,” says Thamm. “Then we have to explain why we’re only bringing one or two turkeys.” There’s also the mental tax the trip puts on the turkeys, which are social animals. The Cuero racing team sometimes takes a cue from horse transporters, bringing along another turkey as a travel buddy to keep Ruby more relaxed.
Over the decades, the relationship between Cuero and Worthington has become much more than just poultry-based, and generations of friendships have been forged. “In the seventies, I went up to Worthington to race four years in a row,” reminisces Kahlich. “It’s a rivalry for sure, but it’s more of a renewal of comradeship,” Adams says. In 2017 after Hurricane Harvey brought devastating floods to Cuero, Worthington supported its sister city by sending a cargo trailer full of food and supplies. “They really stepped up to bat,” says Turkeyfest president Trent Kainer. “We have a deep connection.” In 2023 the Cuero faction chartered a bus of fifty people to travel to Worthington for the King Turkey Day heat. “Some of our best friends are sixteen-hundred miles away, but it’s like you see them every day,” muses Thamm. “It’s crazy to think that it’s all because of a turkey race.”
As for this year’s win, the citizens of Cuero, while in full celebration mode after the race, tried not to gloat. “We’ve had our feathers handed to us plenty of times,” Adams says.
